Dark clouds, yet Zoho sees $1 billion revenue for ManageEngine in a year

Cloud demand will drive India to the second largest market for enterprise IT management software ManageEngine despite larger macroeconomic concerns, Zoho Corporation cofounder Sridhar Vembu said on Tuesday.

Speaking at ManageEngine UserConf Mumbai 2023, Vembu said the Zoho management expects its enterprise IT management division to cross $1 billion in revenue by the next year, given the demand metrics.

The Pleasanton, California and Chennai-headquartered company generates revenue from licensing of software products, consulting, software maintenance and technical support.


“Growth is slower than it was a year ago, but we are still doing well,” Vembu said. The business is seeing signs of longer decision-making by clients, higher client churn, and lower spend by customers, he said.

“What we can hope to do is survive the earthquake. We have built a strong foundation and we expect to survive this,” Vembu said.

“The rate of digitalisation is picking up here (in India) at a rapid pace, making IT management more important than ever and setting up ManageEngine to soon reach $1 billion in global revenue,” he added.

In 2022, Zoho Corp became the first bootstrapped company in India to record an annual revenue of $1 billion. The Indian unit of global business software provider reported a 43% increase in consolidated profit for fiscal 2022, as per its latest filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

Currently the third largest revenue market worldwide for ManageEngine, India is set to surpass the United Kingdom in the next three years, the company said. ManageEngine India has registered a year-over-year growth of 50% in 2022 while the customer count increased by 30%, driven by demand primarily from the BFSI, manufacturing and real estate sectors.

Speaking about the layoffs by big tech companies, Vembu said as a private company, Zoho Corp is willing to take a dip in profit in order to retain its staff and does not see any impact to its 12,000 employee base, almost half of which work for ManageEngine.

“We will be willing to take a decline in profit in order to make sure that we retain our staff. It builds a long-term culture and value system,” he said.

He added that the company is focused on talent creation through its learning programmes, especially to leverage rural talent.