SaaS platform Zoho stands proud crosses $1-billion revenue milestone

Indian software-as-a-service major Zoho could hire more than 1,000 employees over the next one year even as large technology companies across the world such as Stripe, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and others are either laying off staff or putting a freeze on hiring.

The Chennai-headquartered company has also announced that it crossed the milestone of $1 billion in revenue last year. "Our fastest growing market is India, although growth has gone down across the board. It is fast approaching the number 3 position for us and could become number 2 in five years. In 10 years, it might become number 1," said Zoho CEO and co-founder Sridhar Vembu.

He said that while the US market has performed somewhat okay as yet amid fears of a slowdown, the Japanese and Chinese markets have fared the worst.

At a time when enterprises around the world are cutting back on their technology spends, the company sees the Indian market as a bright spot. It said that the domestic business has grown at a CAGR of 65 percent over the last 5 years and is already among its top three markets.

Meanwhile, SaaS unicorn Chargebee has laid off 10 percent of staff amid macro headwinds and Freshworks has reduced growth forecast for the coming quarters.

"We have put a check on our hiring… But we may easily increase our workforce by 10 percent because many things are happening (at the company) and we have a business to run," said Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Zoho.

Singh maintained that this expansion of the workforce could happen only if the macro environment does not worsen anymore. "If things stay the way they are and don't get worse, we can easily hire this number and probably more."

It also has plans to open 100 PoPs (point of presence) around the world in the next five years for providing users with faster access to its services.

The company has business in over 150 countries and has built a user base of over 80 million in the last 25 years of operations.

It provides operating system software for businesses, software for customer relationship management, human resource management, enterprise collaboration platform and

GST-compliant accounting software.

Vembu said that the company's growth is driven by research and development and a lot of firms are shifting to Zoho applications which is driving growth for the company.