Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind the Zoho suite of services. He attended Indian Institute of Technology in Madras for his undergraduate degree, and attended Princeton University for his PhD. Visit the company blog here.

What is Zoho and how do you stay competitive despite similar products from larger companies?

Zoho.com is a suite of office productivity applications in your browser. It is a division of AdventNet, a company with a profitable 10 year track record in the software business, delivering a variety of software applications. The suite includes Zoho Writer for word processing, Zoho Show for presentations, Zoho Sheet for spreadsheets, Zoho Virtual Office for email and collaboration, Zoho Creator which provides an online database with scripting, Zoho Projects for project management, Zoho CRM for keep track of customers, and more.

AdventNet has traditionally done well by going after market segments ignored by the bigger players, often because they were too small to be profitable for the big vendors. We differentiate ourselves from larger companies by keeping our costs low, staying nimble, and adapting quickly to exploit specialized vertical market opportunities that emerge. The Zoho suite is becoming popular in the education segment, for example. Customer support is another key difference, which large companies don't always do well.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of an online office suite?

An online office suite exploits the power of the web for enabling collaboration. For example, Zoho Writer has features for concurrent editing of the same document by multiple users; students use these features to work on joint reports. With Zoho Show, you can make an online presentation to a distributed audience, all of them connecting through a browser.

A second, somewhat less obvious, advantage is that your data is in a professionally managed data center, which actually increases the security and data protection compared to a typical desktop. While there is no such thing as perfect security, online suites can be more secure and less prone to viruses and other threats that plague desktop applications.

Lack of offline access is the main drawback of a purely online office suite, one that will be addressed by the increasing ubiquity of the Internet, as well as plug-ins that provide disconnected-mode of work.

What is your business plan and future goals for the company?

Many of the Zoho services are still in beta, and are evolving rapidly. Once they emerge out of beta, we will continue a generous free edition, and offer subscription based offerings for more advanced users. Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects already follow that model.

We are investing substantial engineering resources to provide breadth and depth in our Zoho offerings. Based on our track record at AdventNet, we are confident we can serve our users well, while building a profitable division.