In the last two years, we have been doing a lot of field marketing and employees were travelling a lot for meetings, workshops, seminars and trade shows. We also have employees based in customer locations for a few weeks because culturally we like to meet people face to face. We’ve since put customer visits and other field marketing events on hold. With our parent company Zoho Corporation running completely on a cloud platform, it meant that the switch to working remotely from home wasn’t a difficult transition for us.
That said, we have gone through an adjustment period, too. We are an R&D-heavy company with 8,000-plus people, including roughly 5,000 active developers. They need access to the source code repository, and that was a huge challenge because we cannot put all the source code on the cloud. Even though all our other applications run on the cloud — collaboration, communication, and content creation — those core repositories could not exist on the cloud.
For two or three weeks, the teams worked really hard to get this working when most people are logging in remotely. That's been a big disruption for us, but in terms of how we run the business, not a lot has changed because we could very quickly connect in other ways.