Zoho expands regional outreach, will open hub offices in Tamil Nadu, UP

CEO Sridhar Vembu says company wants to create 'economically prosperous rural communities' through its offices

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Zoho Corporation, the international technology firm headquartered in Chennai, is expanding to smaller places by opening two hubs in Tiruppur and Trichy in the last six months and plans similar offices in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli and Madurai districts, and one in Uttar Pradesh.

Zoho is expanding Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam, a learning centre in Chennai opened during the pandemic for educating young children living in villages. "We are at a time of increasing economic uncertainty. In addition, powerful artificial intelligence technology could transform the way we work, presenting both huge challenges and opportunities. We are busy reinventing ourselves, and our history of previous reinventions and our strong culture of research and development (R&D) remain as relevant as ever during this reinvention," said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

Zoho started in 2020 a hub-and-spoke model of offices to support its distributed workforce and 'transnational localism' strategy of being locally rooted while being globally connected. Hub offices can accommodate 1000 or more employees and 'spokes' up to 100. Gradually, each hub office will have a few spoke offices associated to it for infrastructure support and team collaboration.

The company has five hub offices, including ones in Chennai, Tenkasi, and Renigunta, and around 30 spoke offices in India. Nearly 2,000 employees work at Zoho’s hub-and-spoke offices in villages and Tier II and tier III towns and of them about 1000 were hired locally. As part of their rural empowerment efforts, the spoke offices conduct free career awareness sessions in neighbouring colleges, skilling workshops and incubation programmes.

"The distributed workforce model reflects the idea of distributing growth and income across Tier 2/3 communities instead of urban concentration. 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.

Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam (KKM) has 130 students—across primary, middle, and high school—from surrounding villages, 19 full-time and 5 part-time teachers. A 75,000 sq ft. facility is under construction at the KKM centre in Tenkasi. This includes a building that can accommodate 750 students, with spacious classrooms dedicated to vocational studies and live workshop sessions around core engineering concepts such as two/four wheeler assembly and electrical projects. Another branch of KKM will open in Cumbam, Theni.

"The driving philosophy behind the rural initiatives is to preserve and revitalise small villages and towns before they decline due to severe urban migration and lack of resources. The future generation in the rural areas needs to be enabled with the necessary skills, capabilities, and tools to nurture grassroots innovation, solve local problems, locally manufacture high-value goods, and drive community progress," said Vembu.