‘Indian software has huge demand’

Zoho on Friday launched a com- prehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, marking its entry into a multi-billion-dol- larmarket dominated by domes- tic and global players. Zoho founder and Chief Scien- tist Sridhar Vembu tells Narayanan V about the rationale behind the move, plans to develop Kumbakonam as a talent hub, and the impact of AI on businesses. Excerpts:

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People write these onemonth premature obituaries. That’s not how these things work. I don’t care about it. By that logic, Zoho should have been declared dead about 500 times.

We started Zoho in 2003. Obituaries were written in 2007, 2010 and again in 2015. We have made a good beginning and there is still a lot of work ahead.

Every week, updates are going out. You will see a surprising number of features every two to three months, and the adoption curve will steadily go up. There is also pent-up demand in India. There is a hunger for made-in-India software, which is why we want all this software to be built here.

How is artificial intelligence (AI) impacting your business?

I would focus on one fundamental area where AI is being used most heavily—software development. In an interesting way, AI is helping automate programming itself and, by extension, software.