INSIDE ZOHO'S BIG BET ON SWADESHI TECH

The company has been quietly building consumer tech products for four years now. We take a closer look.

- Radhika P. Nair

On 27 September, Jeri John Devegeorge, a senior product manager at enterprise software company Zoho Corporation, was on his way to a religious concert in Chennai.

Soon, however, a three-day-old post on microblogging platform X by Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan would scupper those plans.

During a visit to rural Tamil Nadu, Pradhan had visited Zoho’s various centres and been briefed on its work. On the evening of 24 September, he posted about the company’s instant messaging app, Arattai.

The post on Arattai, a Tamil word for chitchat, quickly went viral and has received over a million views so far. Soon, people across the country started downloading the app. The Zoho team, led by Devegeorge, who was in charge of Arattai, had expected and provisioned for 20-fold growth immediately after the minister's post. Indeed, Devegeorge had confidently assured Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s cofounder, erstwhile chief executive officer (CEO) and current chief scientist, that the company had servers and infrastructure in place to handle the expected surge. After all, Zoho was India’s largest enterprise software company, and although consumer tech was different territory, he was sure the company had the chops to handle demand.

But frantic calls from the team revealed that the growth was 100 times more. Concert forgotten, Devegeorge raced to Zoho's campus, off the Grand Southern Trunk Road, on the outskirts of Tamil Nadu’s capital. He didn’t leave the office for the next four days. Some of his team members stayed on for a few more days even after he finally went home.

“We always knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime product for us (the team). It is not easy from a business point of view and a technology point of view to scale a product to the entire world,” Devegeorge, who joined Zoho in 2006, told Mint. “We are talking about billions of users. I told the team we have to capitalize on this opportunity.”