Zoho Corp to expand 'hub' offices in Tamil Nadu, UP

Chennai-based technology company Zoho Corporation said that it is expanding its India operations by opening hub offices in Tirunelveli and Madurai districts in Tamil Nadu as well as one in Uttar Pradesh, with a focus on smaller towns and cities.  

In 2020, Zoho decided to follow a hub-and-spoke model of offices to cater to a distributed workforce, and as part of its 'transnational localism' strategy of being locally rooted, while staying globally connected.  
The hub offices are ones that can accommodate 1,000 or more employees, while the spoke offices are smaller offices of up to 100 employees. Eventually, each hub office will have a few spoke offices associated to it for infrastructure support and team collaboration.  

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company currently has five hub offices in India, including ones in Chennai, Tenkasi, and Renigunta, and around 30 spoke offices. 

Nearly 2,000 employees are working out of Zoho’s hub and spoke offices in villages and Tier II and III towns, out of which about 1,000 employees were hired locally. As part of its rural empowerment efforts, the spoke offices periodically conduct free career awareness sessions in surrounding colleges, as well as upskilling workshops and incubation programmes to identify and hire talented local youth, the company said.  

"The distributed workforce model reflects the idea of distributing growth and income across Tier II and III communities instead of urban concentration,” Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder and CEO, Zoho Corp. He added that many of our product development teams today sit out of these hub and spoke offices, including some teams that are involved in deep-tech R&D. 

“The long-term vision of these efforts is to create self-sufficient and economically prosperous rural communities,” said Vembu.  

Vembu also believes that people are living at a time of “increasing economic uncertainty”. In addition, powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technology could transform the way we work, presenting both huge challenges and opportunities. He, however, emphasised that as “we are busy reinventing ourselves, our history of previous reinventions and our strong culture of R&D remain as relevant as ever during this reinvention”.  

The company also said that it is expanding its current facility of Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam (KKM), a learning centre it opened during the pandemic for educating the young children from villages in and around Tenkasi. The facility currently has 130 students across primary, middle, and high school from surrounding villages, 19 full-time and five part-time teachers.  

On January 28, the company reported a consolidated net profit of ₹2,700 crore in FY22, up nearly 43% year-on-year and a 28% rise in revenue to ₹6,711 crore in FY22 from ₹5,230 crore in FY21, driven by its enterprise IT management software business, as per Zoho’s filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC). 

Vembu said while the scale of US and Europe contribution to the company's overall business is higher, India business is growing very fast and it could be the largest market for the company in the coming years.