Software rental firms turn the spotlight on India

In October, delegates at salesforce.com’s annual conference in San Francisco were witness to an unusual message.

Freshworks, a smaller Indian rival of Salesforce, rented a blimp urging the visitors to “Hit Refresh” and explore its customer engagement software, at the cloud-based customer relationship management company’s event, billed ‘Dreamforce’.

The Chennai-based firm, with revenues of $38 million, and crosstown rival Zoho, with revenues of $287 million, have both used guerrilla marketing in the past to get noticed, and in turn, make customers use their