Zendesk sees huge cloud biz opportunities in India

Customer service platform Zendesk, which recently launched its new platform 'Sunshine', says it is an exciting time to scale a software cloud business in India, and it is on track to reach its goal of $1 billion by 2020.

For Zendesk, which opened a new office in Bengaluru two years ago, India is one of the fastest growing markets. Its number of customers are increasing over 25% year-on-year, and India is one among its top 10 markets globally in terms of the number of paid customers.

Sunshine is an open platform built on Amazon Web Services. Talking about it, Adrian McDermott, President of Products, Zendesk, who was in Bengaluru recently said, "It is a new style of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Many companies that use the public cloud and private data centres are creating new opportunities for SaaS (Software as a service) companies to think about how they want to build products and how they want to integrate products together."

The NYSE-listed company, which surpassed the $600 million annual revenue run rate, recently acquired San Francisco-based Base. The company said Base's salesforce automation tool has fit well with its service tools. At a recent conference, Base was rebranded as Zendesk Sell.

"We know many startups in digital businesses that we work with and traditional businesses that are going through a digital transformation. They are creating solutions inside the public cloud and AWS, they are in fact building on top of the Google cloud platform and they are using different toolsets. One of the things we wanted to do is to build a next-generation CRM for those companies and say, rather than using a traditional API, one can use the tools of the cloud directly," said McDermott.

The company is also doubling its workforce every six months. "We have about 20 people in India and we will be doubling the number shortly," said K T Prasad, Country Sales Director, Zendesk India, adding that APAC continues to surpass its global growth, at a rate of approximately 40% year-on-year.