Zoho Corporation, headquartered in Chennai, India is a multinational technology company that makes web-based business tools. They provide operating system for businesses involving cloud-based suite of applications. Starting out primarily in small business, now it has moved into large enterprises with 15 million users worldwide.
Zoho is a company which has a very different perspective of CSR. Zoho considers social impact and corporate social responsibility as central to its mission and its activities. They work towards combining profit & positive impact as well in a holistic way. Business activity and doing good for society have to go together by nurturing local talent is what they believe in.
Our association with Zoho started from the year 2017. As Annapoorna has scaled its operations from a few hundred school children to five hundred thousand children, it has increasingly leveraged digitalization and automation of infrastructure and processes such as invoicing, payments, reporting and data collection to achieve a high level of operational efficiency and financial accountability. To our surprise, Zoho did not approach us like any other company does for the CSR activities. No cheque book diplomacy as well. They offered support to Annapoorna in the form of life-time access to a suite of cloud-based software applications, absolutely free – email spacing, complete ERP & payment systems required to run small & medium enterprises, analytics & storage spacing. They also provide Annapoorna with a team of developers who support customization of this software to serve the complex needs of Annapoorna. They are in fact looking forward to a case study as to how IT can leverage their support to NGO like Annapoorna which can bring about capabilities of handling large data in an efficient way.
We continue engaging with them in a long-standing way. Look forward to continuing this association in the times to come.
