sridhar vembu who founded zoho picks up students completing class 12 or in the second year of a diploma after class 10 in corporation schools in chennai and other towns in tamil nadu and puts them through a oneyear classroom training and a sixmonth onthejob training the students are mostly from poor backgrounds when they join zoho university as it is called they are provided with a laptop with unlimited internet access free lunch and dinner and a stipend of rs 6000 a month they are trained in computer programming as also in math and english almost all are absorbed into zoho and when they join they are given salaries at par with those joining from the iits and other engineering institutes today 170 employees out of zohos total strength of 1600 are from zoho university says aravind natarajan of zoho vembus philosophy has been that it does not require an iit graduate to create worldclass products out of india and given the tremendous success of his office and business applications zoho has six million subscribers globally and competes against google microsoft and salesforcecom he seems to be right natarajan says vembus objective is to ensure that 50 of zoho employees would be from zoho university the training facility started with six students in 2005 the latest batch has 59 some of the fastest growing startups in india are employing vembulike strategies creating talent themselves instead of hoping that the external environment would generate the talent required which it does not at least not fast enough the strategy also often helps them to keep costs under control smaller firms typically have to pay higher salaries to attract skilled people from more established companies an intense training programme for freshers obviates that mu sigma started what it calls the mu sigma university around the same time that zoho did the company which helps clients analyse the massive quantities of data they deal with and arrive at decisions needed people with analytical skills india has plenty of talent in math and quantitative techniques given that parents emphasize math for their children at an early age that was very good for us but we needed to convert that into analytical talent says ambiga rajaram who handles talent creation in the company the emphasis of the training is on inferential learning the contrast here is with experiential learning where past experience is a guide to the future the understanding is that in todays environment businesses have to be very innovative often doing things their industry never did before like when apple started a retail store says ambiga mu sigma has developed its own methodologies in inferential learning ambiga says the programme has over time become almost a minimba we are even training employees on how to consult with customers in order to bring new business she says the mu sigma university is a big reason why the company has so rapidly scaled it has 1500 employees and is expected to cross 100