Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zoho Corporation


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Opinions vary, but the strongest argument seems to be the sources given by Cunard, backed up by several others. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  17:11, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Zoho Corporation

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

My extensice PROD removed by someone who was likely either part of this company or a user I encountered last night who was upset about an article, I'm not sure, but my concerns are still genuine and clear, as this is only PR entirely, it has been touched by the company and businessman himself as the history shows and there's simply nothing actually of the severe improvements needed and it's not going to happen because it's all unconvincing PR. SwisterTwister  talk  15:38, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions.  SwisterTwister   talk  18:11, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. North America1000 06:20, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. North America1000 06:20, 5 October 2016 (UTC)


 * delete or redirect to Zoho Office Suite, which is minor but notable - David Gerard (talk) 10:55, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep and improve. The company is notable, it's not a close call in my opinion, but obviously the article needs work. The company is well known as an independent, cheap business SaaS app. It receives regular and extensive coverage in independent reliable sources:
 * Information Week:
 * PC Mag
 * Diginomica
 * The Next Web.

All four of those articles are by writers/reviewers that work for the publications in question and have written extensively about many companies. And that's just in the last 12 weeks. Chris vLS (talk) 16:58, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
 * The problem is that improvement would require sources. (That Diginomica piece comes closest, but it appears to be a blog about startups run by an analyst company, i.e. sponsored information is literally their business; not quite what we generally mean by editorially-reviewed RS.) I'm not sure this is usefully a separate article from the one about the office suite or about Zoho Survey, which says in the article it's part of the office suite ... - David Gerard (talk) 18:09, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
 * There are tons of sources. Google "zoho venturebeat" "zoho techcrunch" "zoho techrepublic" to find lots of sources going back years. They have been listed in Gartner Magic Quadrants for years. Heck, there are probably articles about companies that have received less coverage than Zoho's ads during Salesforce's conference the last three years. (Google "zoho dreamforce") Chris vLS (talk) 00:04, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Actual refs in the article would be 100% more convincing than "I'm not going to tell you, go prove my point for me" - David Gerard (talk) 01:02, 8 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete as corporate spam; strictly a client prospectus / product brochure in the form of a Wikipedia article. No value to the project at this time, and no indications of notability or significance. Name could be redirected after deletion to Zoho Office Suite at editorial discretion. K.e.coffman (talk) 23:42, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Zoho Office Suite. There's enough for the product and the company can fit in there. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 04:08, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.  The article notes: "But nothing else at Zoho Corp is child’s play: The 48-year-old Vembu is deadly serious about how he runs the company, which he co-founded as AdventNet Inc in 1996 with his brothers Kumar and Sekar, as well as Tony Thomas, an entrepreneur who wrote an early version of the software that would become WebNMS, the company’s first product which found buyers in telecom network equipment makers like Cisco Systems, Inc. (Thomas was three years senior to Vembu at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.) Thomas served as the first CEO of AdventNet and was also its chairman and chief technology officer for a spell. Vembu was its chief evangelist, which meant he focussed on promoting and marketing the technology the company was selling. Vembu took over as CEO in 2000 while Thomas, in 2004, moved out to start another company Applibase Inc in Sunnyvale, California, which was acquired by internet company Vtiger. He now runs Edcite, an education startup in the Bay Area, which he founded four years ago. Thomas retains a stake in Zoho, and also serves as a member of the advisory board at Vembu Technologies Private Limited, founded by Sekar. ... AdventNet became Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd only in 2009, and it was around that time that the direction in which the company was headed crystallised. Businesses were increasingly turning to the internet for rented software to run their operations, rather than buy licences for expensive software. Zoho.com, the company’s youngest division, offering internet-based software for work—from email to collaboration and office productivity tools to software for managing customers, vendors and partners—was emerging as the most promising for the future. There was also a shift in geography: While AdventNet Inc was a US company with an India development centre, Zoho Corp is incorporated in India and the company’s Pleasanton, California, centre remains the global headquarters. Vembu, who works out of the Pleasanton office which is sales-facing, visits India, where all of the development activity takes place, usually once every quarter. Apart from Zoho.com, Zoho Corp has two other divisions: The telecom network software division WebNMS, which the company began with, and the Manage Engine division, started around 2003, which builds software for companies to monitor and manage their own IT networks. Manage Engine accounts for over half of Zoho Corp’s revenues, but Zoho.com is the fastest growing. Vembu won’t reveal any additional details of the privately held company, but in November 2012, Bloomberg published an interview with the Zoho chief that put Manage Engine’s revenue at $120 million, while Zoho Corp’s overall revenue was close to $200 million at that time. Vembu likes to say Zoho Corp today has revenue per employee that’s twice that of Infosys, which at a rough reckoning puts his current revenues at about $360-$370 million."  The article notes: "But Zoho, a company based in Pleasanton, Calif., that offers similar services, is solidly profitable, with revenue of more than $50 million a year. And it has never taken a cent in venture capital or bank loans. Now, Zoho has other businesses — data center and networking management tools — but the online productivity suite is its fastest-growing operation, said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s chief executive. And Zoho’s foothold suggests that there will be promising openings for innovative upstarts even in markets, like online productivity applications, that are expected to be dominated by a few large companies. ... Part of the opportunity for Zoho lies in differentiation. It has 19 online productivity and collaboration applications, including customer relationship management, project management and invoicing. So it only competes head-to-head against Google with five offerings. Zoho focuses mainly on the business market. Half of its distribution is through partners that integrate Zoho products into their offerings. Most of those partners are Web-based services. For example, Box.net, a service for storing, backing up and sharing documents, uses Zoho as the editing tool for uploaded documents. Low-cost Web-based software makes these business mash-ups possible in a way that would not work with traditional software."  The article notes: "The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more. Zoho Writer handles the basics and provides many advanced functions without breaking a sweat — like the ability to edit a document when page breaks are displayed. Google Docs can’t. Writer works even when one is offline, thanks to open source technology developed by Google, and used by Zoho in its word processor four months before Google used it. ... Zoho is a division of AdventNet, which provides online software services to corporate I.T. departments and is based in Pleasanton, Calif. AdventNet, privately held, says its I.T. software is profitable but doesn’t claim the same for Zoho, which AdventNet created in 2005."</li> <li> The article notes: "The vision of Zoho Corporation is to become the 'operating system of business.' Originally founded in 1996 as AdventNet, Inc., a network management company, Zoho changed gears in 2005 to focus on cloud-based services for businesses. Since then, Zoho's offerings have grown to include 34 Web apps and 30 mobile apps for running all aspects of a business, from project management and human resources to email and social media tracking. In 2008, the company hit one million users. Today, that number exceeds 20 million. As I found when I recently visited Zoho's headquarters in Chennai, India, the company's do-it-all, full-services approach is not only reserved for its customers. ... In the last few years, Zoho has been through a major growth spurt. It hit 1 million users in August 2008, 5 million by January 2012, and 10 million by February 2014. Now, two years later, it has doubled again. Of Zoho's apps, Zoho Mail has the largest user base, but Zoho CRM$20.00 at Zoho has the largest customer base and is by many accounts the company's best known product. All told, the company has more than 100,000 customers. In the software business, customers are often a more clear indicator of size than users (because a user can be anyone who created a free account and never really used it). To put Zoho's 100,000 into perspective, Salesforce reported having more than 150,000 customers in its 2015 report [PDF]. ... Zoho's headquarters are in an expansive IT park on the outskirts of town. The company moved there a few years ago to get out of a more crowded section of Chennai called Velachery, where it was quickly running out of space. The new site is on nearly 45 acres, much of it still undeveloped. A massive project is in the works to build multiple offices that will become the workplace for 8,000 to 9,000 employees when it's all finished."</li> <li> The article notes: "It has more than 100,000 customers in over 100 countries anand counts Microsoft as its leading competitor. It is possibly India's most untold software success story. Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd, functioning from a trendy IT park surrounded by coconut trees in the Chennai suburb of Porur, is also breaking the myth that Indians are good for cheap labour and not high-value products. If many still have not heard of the 2,500-employee company, it must be because it shuns the stuff ambitious software companies are often in the news for: raising venture capital, going public with a share issue, getting acquired or borrowing from banks to expand. ... AdventNet began as a humble maker of niche telecom products but an industry crash around 2,000 threatened prospects and it formed Zoho Corporation in 2003 as a new flagship unit. Zoho is a 'born-on-the-cloud' business that offers software as a service (SaaS) to small enterprises much like Google's Apps or Microsoft's Office 365. Its range includes everything from word processing and spreadsheets to recruitment and customer relations management (CRM). Zoho does not disclose revenues but Vegesna says it is a 'few hundred million dollars' and growing 70% year on year. On a conservative estimate of $400 million, Zoho has a revenue per employee of around $160,000 - three times that of Infosys."</li> <li> The article notes: "Forbes describes Mr Sridhar Vembu as the ‘Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur.' But little is known in India about this founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, which is India's Google. It offers most of the products that Google offers, including email application. It is a story of ‘rags to riches' for the soft spoken, middle class Chennai lad who has created a $150-million company based out of Chennai. The IIT Madras alumnus formed AdventNet in 1996 along with two of his brothers and three friends. AdventNet is today better known as Zoho, which boasts of nearly 60,000 clients, including NASA, GE, Sony, Lufthansa, and AOL. Zoho today employs 1,600 at the DLF IT Park."</li> <li> The article notes: "[Sridhar] Vembu, the chief executive officer for Zoho, has no aspirations to take the company public. In 2000, he turned down a venture capitalist who would have valued the company at $200 million, he said. Now, Zoho makes nearly that amount in annual revenue. ... Vembu’s company started out as an excuse for him to move back home to Chennai, India. He had been working on wireless technology for two years at San Diego-based Qualcomm, as did his brother, a software engineer. Then in 1996, the pair decided to do their own thing. The brothers also took a while to decide on a name. The company had operated under Vembu Systems, Advent Network Management and AdventNet over the years. One reason for the changes was fear of being sued over trademark infringement, which can kill a company without venture capital, Vembu said. ... Early on, the startup sold software to network-management companies, including Cisco Systems and Motorola. At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, when there were hundreds of networking companies in Silicon Valley, AdventNet sold its products to about half of them, according to Vembu. When the industry imploded, the company’s revenue dropped precipitously. Then in 2004, AdventNet introduced ManageEngine, a software suite for corporate information-technology departments that now accounts for $120 million in annual revenue. The following year, the company created Zoho, which includes Web-based sales management, communication and productive tools."</li> <li> The article notes: "Tony Thomas has learned the value of staying power in a short time. Seven years after starting his first company, the India-born entrepreneur is still in the game. Thomas' company, AdventNet Inc. of Pleasanton, already has survived brutal market swings and has managed to outlast many of his contemporaries. The company has done this on its own dime; AdventNet has not received any venture capital funding since its founding in 1996. This accomplishment is even more notable given that the company's target market - the battered telecommunications industry - is still in the midst of a bone-crunching downturn that has humbled once mighty giants such as Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Corp. and Lucent Technologies Inc. ... AdventNet competes in a small niche of this market, which keeps it from going head-to-head with giants such as IBM Corp., BMC Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. But the company's focus on the telecommunications sector still left it vulnerable when that market began to sputter in 2001. ... More than 90 percent of AdventNet's 420-person work force is based in the company's facilities in Chennai, a city in Southern India near Thomas' hometown of Bangalore."</li> <li>The numerous articles in TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/tag/zoho/.</li> </ol>There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow Zoho Corporation to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 06:14, 21 October 2016 (UTC) </li></ul>
 * I oppose a merge to Zoho Office Suite because Zoho Corporation contains more divisions than Zoho.com. From the Forbes India article I linked above: "Apart from Zoho.com, Zoho Corp has two other divisions: The telecom network software division WebNMS, which the company began with, and the Manage Engine division, started around 2003, which builds software for companies to monitor and manage their own IT networks. Manage Engine accounts for over half of Zoho Corp’s revenues, but Zoho.com is the fastest growing. Vembu won’t reveal any additional details of the privately held company, but in November 2012, Bloomberg published an interview with the Zoho chief that put Manage Engine’s revenue at $120 million, while Zoho Corp’s overall revenue was close to $200 million at that time. Vembu likes to say Zoho Corp today has revenue per employee that’s twice that of Infosys, which at a rough reckoning puts his current revenues at about $360-$370 million." Cunard (talk) 06:14, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Each one of those contains blatantly over specifics about the company such as the dollar amounts the company spent either by themselces or by partnering with other companies, that is blatant PR because only the company knows that and therefore is advertising it, to attempt interest by clients and investors, therefore it's not independent or substantial. Every single one of those is simply republishing the company's own plans including actual quotes, therefore it's also not independent or substantial, and we shouldn't mistake it as otherwise simply because it was republished in a news source. This is the type of churnalism "news" that simply consists of the company supplying its own information and blatantly including company specifics, as with the links above.
 * Therefore, simply quoting and then actually emphasizing them actually worsens the situation by then actually showing the genuine bareness of quality substantial news, not simply the obvious republished company quotes, plans and dollar specifics. Note how literally every single paragraph always starts with "From the company:....", "The company offers" (this one is particularly listed several times, naturally) "The company plans", "The businessman's thoughts are", "the company focuses", "The company's activities include", "The company's customers", "The founders say" or "The company says" therefore clear PR and certainly not independent. By not actually acknowledging these blatant quotes before listing them as "substantial and independent", it shows we cannot consider such PR sources to be convincing. Another thing is that there's been explicitly clear consensus Indian news are clear "pay-for" news and therefore cannot be taken seriously regardless of what is claimed or mentioned, and it's again especially clear when the information considerably consists pf interviewed information and quotes. Once we start accepting any means of republished PR, we are then actually first-hand accepting advertising, in violations of WP:ADVERTISING, WP:DEL14 and WP:NOT, therefore we actually have choices to toss aside any 'republished news' for the sake of saving this encyclopedia. SwisterTwister   talk  06:44, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Indeed - if the low-quality churnalism in Cunard's supplied sources are the best that can be found, this is evidence against the company actually being notable - David Gerard (talk) 15:01, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
 * That the journalists interviewed the subject of their articles is good journalistic practice. Only some of the coverage contains quotes like "The company says". Much of the coverage is written in the journalists' own words. Cunard (talk) 21:40, 22 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep AFD is not cleanup and the company has been covered in multiple reliable, independent sources, per above. The article needs work, but it's notable. Prefer redirect to delete if consensus is that it's not notable. Smartyllama (talk) 14:34, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. Fails WP:CORP (a significantly tougher test than the WP:GNG).  The content, and coverage, is no more than facts or promotion.  Zoho Office Suite is no better.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:33, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
 * WP:CORPDEPTH is met through the significant coverage in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, PC Week, and Forbes India. The content, and coverage, is no more than facts or promotion. – it is good that the content contains facts—why is this a bad thing? Regarding the accusation about promotion, no evidence has been provided here that the very reputable publications The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, PC Week, and Forbes India are publishing advertisements masquerading as serious news articles about Zoho. Cunard (talk) 21:40, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
 * All of the sources you've highlighted read to me as infomercials. A weak pretence of independent coverage, no genuine objective criticism. I'm guess that tees days this is how newspapers and journalists pay their bills. I used to pay for weekly delivery of the New York Times, long ago. I guess it's my fault, I haven't paid directly for a newspaper with any regularity for many years now. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:41, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I cannot agree that The New York Times is publishing "infomercials". It is not necessary for an article about a company to have "genuine objective criticism" to make the source independent of the subject. That you are saying The New York Times is not independent of Zoho Corporation merely because it has not published criticism of Zoho yet strongly underscores the arguments for deletion are very weak. Cunard (talk) 03:50, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Admittedly, I never cared much for the business and technology sections, but everything I have read on Zoho is infomercial. Including from the NYT.  And it is the same infomercial across the newspapers, computer magazines, and review sites.   Infomercial cross how-to.  Occasional information on Zoho limitations is always a subtle promotion of another product, not necessarily Zoho, it is all part of a bigger game.   Business promotion is not encyclopedic content, and the line is repeatedly crossed on the three Wikipedia Zoho articles. Zoho clearly engages in promotion and brand management, and it permeates everything I can find.  True, this is a weak delete, there is no denying its wide existence, and if kept it needs to be watched for excessive promotion.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:30, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

<div class="xfd_relist" style="border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 25px;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep – Meets WP:CORPDEPTH per a review of available sources, such as those provided above by and . Additional sources are also available, such as, ,  and more. Promotional tone can be addressed by copy editing the article. North America1000 08:13, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  MBisanz  talk 22:52, 23 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment -- the sources listed are not convincing me to change my vote in favour of retaining the article. K.e.coffman (talk) 00:35, 24 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete or redirect to Zoho Office Suite (If at all needed) - If this is the quality of the "best" sources we have found, then this should be deleted to prevent the encyclopaedia from becoming a promotional garbage dump. A lot of it is coverage about the product which cannot be used for demonstrating notability of the company. A lot of the rest is essentially dependent on quotes by an employee which doesn't satisfy CORPIND. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 17:31, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Actually per WP:PRODUCT, part of the WP:CORP notability guideline page, "If a company is notable, information on its products and services should generally be included in the article on the company itself". North America1000 12:44, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, but it doesn't help to prove notability of the organisation. "A specific product or service may be notable on its own, without the company providing it being notable in its own right". --Lemongirl942 (talk) 13:36, 29 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep we've got sources that seem quite reasonable. The better sources mostly discuss the company's products, but that's fine and exactly what we expect a company to be discussed for.  And sources like  seem to be fine if overly fawning. And this isn't some small company--apparently they have 3000+ employees.  All told we have a company which has plenty of coverage, is large, and seems to have massive coverage.  Hobit (talk) 11:34, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm going to take this a step farther. Not having an article on Zoho would be a flaw in our encyclopedia.  This is a very large and well covered topic.  For now most of the coverage is fawning, but it appears to be a David trying to take market share from a Goliath (well two, Google and Salesforce). We've got coverage in the best sources we could expect, including the NYT.  It's over the bar by a bunch. Hobit (talk) 11:40, 7 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.