Cxo of the week: Venkateshan Ramasubramanian, VP, Engineering and site lead at ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a go-to-market intelligence platform, enabling sales, marketing, and recruiting teams around the world to uncover untapped growth opportunities and surpass their targets by leveraging its proprietary modern revenue operating system, RevOS. It allows brands to drive more predictable, accelerated, and sustainable growth to thrive in the rapidly evolving business landscape.

The company empowers its Engineering, Product and Design, and Customer Experience teams to work on building cutting-edge technology with modern tech stacks and effective processes. Employees have the ability to lead, learn, and work on the most exciting technologies at a high scale, with the opportunity to take on elevated levels of responsibility by owning everything from architecture through deployment. The company sees high rates of upward mobility across all teams, and in particular, engineers enjoy a growth rate much higher than in other companies of similar size.

Venkateshan Ramasubramanian is the Vice President of Engineering and the Chennai Site Lead at ZoomInfo, a global provider in modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence. He works closely with the company’s core engineering and product teams and leaders to establish, drive, and execute strategic initiatives. He is also responsible for the technology roadmap of ZoomInfo’s products developed in India, and his work mainly covers areas like innovation, collaboration, customer engagement, and process efficiencies.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with  Venkateshan Ramasubramanian, VP, Engineering and site lead at ZoomInfo. He shared his views on how AI, VR, and AR have accelerated the digital transformation of businesses and also share his journey so far.

Tell us about ZoomInfo and your offerings. Tell us about the team.

ZoomInfo helps businesses find, acquire, and grow their next best customers. Our platform delivers real-time signals that show when someone is in the market searching for your solution. At a time when everyone is being asked to do more with less, ZoomInfo helps businesses grow revenue efficiently and at scale.

ZoomInfo customers rely on its revenue operating system, RevOS, which consists of four platforms:SalesOS, MarketingOS, OperationsOS, and TalentOS. These solutions pair best-in-class technology with unrivaled data coverage, accuracy, and depth of company and contact information. ZoomInfo has a best-in-class team with its major centers in the U.S., Israel, and India. Over the years, ZoomInfo has built its team both organically and through various key acquisitions.

What are the drivers/market trends that are shaping the AI platform in 2023?

ChatGPT seems to be disrupting and changing the landscape of AI platforms in 2023. With the easy to use chat, fast responsiveness, coverage of topics, and accuracy of responses has put many of the existing solutions, including Google Search, on their toes.

Data privacy and accuracy have been a major focus for various governments and organizations across the world. With AI growing into many use cases and global political challenges, questions related to data are becoming more and more important. Where, how much time, what, how data is stored, and how it is used are being asked by individual users and corporations alike. AI use cases which are fed by data must take into account the data privacy and security as they deliver results.

How is ZoomInfo tapping these market trends for growth?

ZoomInfo is looking at all the latest AI technologies and working on incorporating them into our solutions. Customers want the latest and greatest data delivered to them in the fastest, easiest, and most reliable and secure way. ZoomInfo extensively uses AI and machine learningL to ensure these demands are met by removing duplicates, integrating with multiple data sources, inferring from data that can be used by customers to make well informed decisions, etc. ZoomInfo will look at disruptive trends like ChatGPT and work on augmenting the solutions at the right time.

ZoomInfo ensures both static and dynamic data is secure, makes sure we adhere to various privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA, etc.), and ensures customer data is kept separate from each other. AI engines run on massive data and ZoomInfo ensures the correct data are used for the particular use cases, as per the privacy laws.

Tell us about ZoomInfo expansion plans in Indian markets and the aggressive growth seen in India.

We’ve invested significantly in our India operations, including opening an office in Chennai last year and developing products, such as ZoomInfo Chat, entirely out of India. India is a strategic geographic location for us, and we’ll continue to build out our team, operations, and brand in the country. In recent years, the Indian market has seen an aggressive growth in the technology sector, and ZoomInfo intends to leverage this growth to establish a strong presence in the country.

What kind of software solutions does the company provide?

Zoominfo is a business-to-business data and technology company that provides a suite of software solutions aimed at streamlining and improving the performance of sales, marketing, and recruitment functions within organizations. Whether looking to grow businesses, find the right talent, or gaining deeper customer insights ZoomInfo can help.

Tell us about ZoomInfo RevOS?

RevOS is ZoomInfo’s unified system for sales, marketing, operations, and talent/HR/recruiting teams. It delivers the data, insights, software, and integrations needed by businesses and professionals to achieve their growth potential in a new insight-driven era of digital selling. RevOS has four main components: SalesOS, MarketingOS, OperationsOS, and TalentOS. This system empowers businesses to consistently engage with the right people at the right companies at the right time with relevant messages. RevOS features a unified login and app administration experience, with all apps and tools launched and managed from a single dashboard to give users at-a-glance information regarding their campaigns. Users can switch between applications effortlessly, allowing for seamless workflows between RevOS applications.

How AI, VR, and AR have accelerated the digital transformation of businesses?

AR and VR have reduced the dependency of businesses to spend lots of money on props, risky environments, and travel costs when it comes to employee training, marketing/sales campaigns, product demos, etc. ZoomInfo is seeing marketing campaigns and sales cycles involving product demos using more VRand MR (Mixed Reality) in order to close deals faster.

AI has made huge strides in the digital transformation of every part of business,including IT, R&D, Operations, Customer Service, HR, Marketing & Sales, and Finance. AI enhances repetitive tasks, chatbots in customer engagement, predictions, and what-if scenarios in marketing/sales use cases, etc. AI, VR, and AR help to speed up processes, safeguard data, reduce costs, manage risks, and stay ahead of competition by helping businesses in their digital transformation.

What has 2022 changed for you? How are things now?

Macroeconomic impact has been felt all over the world for most of the companies, and ZoomInfo is no exception.  ZoomInfo is exceptionally well-placed for growth as the economy rebounds and companies look to improve their marketing and sales investment. The best solutions that are available in the market are from ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo continues to improve its product quality and adoption to deliver tremendous value to its customers.

What are your growth priorities for 2023?

ZoomInfo has laid out clear priorities for 2023 in terms of product experience, going up-market, excellence and efficiency improvement. We are being nimble and reactive, watching closely how 2023 will pan out given the uncertainties in global markets. Our priorities are aligned to these in terms of taking our excellent products and services to up-market customers and improving efficiency in every part of business.