One on One with Raju Vegesna of Zoho Online

Raju Vegesna is an evangelist for Zoho [1] and is one of the key people responsible for developing the strategic direction of the Zoho Suite. As such, he is considered a thought leader on Web 2.0 and cloud computing concepts. We asked Vegesna about what it's like competing with Google and Microsoft, and trying to sell cloud computing in the enterprise.

FCM: You're more than an online office suite. Do you consider Google competition or a partner?

RV: Yes, we offer a lot more apps than an office suite. We currently have 19+ applications in our product portfolio. While we compete with Google in some areas (productivity & collaboration apps), we compliment them in others (business apps). This is co-opetition. This is from the applications side, but on the technology side, we work with Google in moving the web forward in promoting standards-based technologies. We use Google Gears for example to offer offline capability in our apps. Similarly, we integrate our sign-on systems to make it easier for customers using apps from both Google & Zoho (there are quite a few who use it this way).

FCM: How concerned are you about the online version of Office 2010?

RV: We are not concerned about this. We are in fact looking forward to it as it validates the market for web apps. To give you an example, before Google entered the online office market, users were asking us 'Why should I use Online Office?'. After Google entered the market, people started asking us 'How are you better than Google?'. We believe when Microsoft enters the market, the size of the market will increase and the number of people using online apps will increase, which is good for us. We don't think Microsoft or Google entering this market will really kill us. We talked about this earlier.

FCM: I know you just teamed up with VMware to offer virtualization of Zoho behind the firewall. How much push back are you still getting from CIOs worried about security related to cloud computing?

RV: The reality is, enterprises are just starting to look at cloud applications. The IT departments have been looking at these trends for some time and now they are slowly starting to involve the finance departments. Enterprises want to keep control of the data and they want to integrate these apps with their existing systems/investment to make the best out of the cloud apps. Cloud apps behind their firewall gives them more control and can integrate with their existing apps.

FCM: Gmail went down the other day and it was like the sky was falling. How do you answer cloud computing critics who say that's exactly what's wrong with these types of solutions?

RV: What people don't realize is that the uptime of Gmail is much higher than the uptime of their locally hosted email system. Same is the case with security, data backup, data protection and other aspects compared to locally hosted systems. That said, we are still in initial stages of cloud apps and the stability and uptime of these apps increase as vendors gain experience with these systems. This is no different from software. Initial versions could have possible bugs and could crash, but as the software matures they become stable. We are going through this process for cloud apps. The uptime of these apps increase as we move forward.

FCM: From a compliance stand point, how can companies maintain control of their Zoho data for regulatory purposes if they are using the public cloud?

RV: Companies own their data, not Zoho. So they have complete control of the data they put into Zoho which means they can take the data out of our system at any time and do whatever with it. That said, we are building automated functionality that lets companies set rules on the data for compliance purposes.