Australia is one of Zoho's larger markets, even though it gets relatively little attention compared with local providers such as MYOB and Xero, or giants such as Salesforce.

The company claims that its Zoho One integrated suite "can put a business completely on the cloud".

Zoho's applications cover office productivity (word processing, email, spreadsheets, etc), collaboration, project management, CRM, HRM, IT management, help desk, analytics, and finance and accounting.

The proportion of SMEs on the company's customer list reflects the nature of the local economy, but Zoho also claims customers in the airline, mining and financial services sectors.

The choice of Byron Bay reflects the company's strategy of selecting less-popular locations for improved staff retention, which it says is the highest in the industry.

Byron Bay's advantages were said to include good transport links and proximity to universities.

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu described the move into Australia as "a crucial part of our global expansion".

The company has also revealed plans to open cloud data centres in NSW and Victoria by the end of April.

The move should assuage potential customers' data sovereignty concerns, as well as reducing the latency that can affect the performance of cloud applications.

In related news, Zoho recently appointed Timothy Kasbe to the role of managing director for ANZ and global large enterprise.

He previously held senior positions at IBM and Reliance Industries, among other organisations.