Saturday, September 01, 2007

Zoho - Online Applications Suite - Aha Zoho !!

It has been long time since I blogged...Around 8 months..Really toooo late.I was very interested after seeing Zoho and thought of throwing my laziness away and get the word out to increase Zoho's marketshare :-).

I have heard about zoho from ReadWriteWeb long back.I thought this was just another Web 2.0 application suite. I did not explore much. When I visited Chennai WikiCamp, I could see Zoho banners. I wondered how come Zoho reached Chennai..Is there any India connection.. etc? Somehow I forgot about that. Later when I was reading something like Zoho CRM is better than Salesforce's CRM offering, I googled to find out more.

I realised that Zoho is a suite from an Indian company based in Chennai. The company behind this is Adventnet.

Zoho contains many online applications- which are hosted in their servers and offer on demand access to them. This is the same model followed by Google Docs/Spreadsheets and Salesforce.com also. The applications available are Online equivalents of Word,Excel, Powerpoint etc - and other apps like CRM, Survey Tool, Mail.

They even have an application creation tool - Zoho Creator - using which you can generate applications. They have created their own script called Deluge using which you can customize the application created. [Read What Suganya - Lead Architect of Deluge Script - says]

In most of the applications they offer, the reviews they have got is very good - sitting almost at the top.Its very good to see an Indian company - [Headquartered in US - CEO, Evangelist, Architects etc are Indians. I think the dev team primarily is from Chennai office]-winning the Web 2.0 battle ..that too in the same business where there are bigger rivals like Google(Google Docs/Spreadsheets) , MS(Desktop Office Space) and Salesforce.

Some of the interesting aspects I noted:
1) They do not spend much money in marketing. Rely a lot on online marketing, Blogs et al.,
From Zoho Blogs

"There is no big secret to our low prices - we keep our costs under control (like any sane business would) and pass on the savings to the customer. "

"typical enterprise software business model where five even ten dollars are spent on sales & marketing for every dollar spent on R&D "

Zoho blogs say that companies such as Salesforce.com spend a lot of money on marketing, which zoho is not doing. This is a major reason why Zoho is cheaper.

2) All their Apps have free versions. If you need more users / more projects to be used etc - you may have to pay.

3) Technology behind these apps is JAVA..
[Too bad - I dont know Java - I lose the opportunity to work in a good company and of course the other sentence goes without saying;-)]

Zoho is a good inspiration for those who want to try differently instead of following the usual - linear - IT services model.

Hats off Zoho..

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