Zoho - I’ve been a long standing fan of Zoho and saw their potential back in 2006 when they were first coming on the market. Before I get into them a little, I need to myth bust. They are viewed constantly as this startup making good. In truth, they are part of Adventnet, a nothing-like-a-startup and there are 600 engineers devoted to Adventnet products. This is a highly skilled company with a smart contemporary culture and a transparent, honest and responsive CEO, Sridhar Vembu, who, while I have some disagreements with when it comes to his public pronouncements, is, all in all, a refreshing change in his willingness to be actually accessible beyond a press conference or formal call and genuinely transparent regardless of the heat it might generate. Zoho has always provided a widespread and nearly complete collaboration suite. Originally consumer-strength and mostly free of charge, at the end of 2007, they announced their first “Business Edition” applications. They are web-based, not on demand per se, though they have a subscription model. Germane to us in these here parts, they have a CRM application - in reality, a sales force automation application. I have to tell you, it is functionally pretty solid. Its weakness, as with most Zoho collaboration and operational tools also, is that they don’t integrate that well with each other or with any other applications. The lack of integration issue seems to have been an issue that I fanned the flames of - though actually that isn’t entirely true. It was actually re-ignited by a comment from a reader of my blog Phil Hodgin in the above linked blog entry of mine - though I agree with him wholeheartedly. In any case, their lack of integration is addressed by Sridhar in this Zoho blog entry if you want to read about it. Shortly after the not-very-controversial controversy, Zoho announced Zoho CloudSQL, a first step really. It is middleware for developers that allows the use of SQL to access Zoho data in the cloud and is compatible with MySQL and Oracle’s, IBM’s and Informix’ flavors of SQL. A start at least. They have a staggering array of applications - enough to take up several more “pages” of a blog entry like this. What is important is that they get the social customer’s thinking and are geared to a future of “social customer behavior. Their combination of collaboration tools and operational applications is broad enough and now functionally deep enough and organized enough (See Zoho Creator and Zoho Notebook), lack of thorough integration notwithstanding, to provide a genuinely useful set of apps that small and midsized businesses can understand. While they are an astonishing open company and an honest one, they are not the greatest marketers on the planet and that is painful because they are up against the best in the software world in some cases. Beyond Sridhar, they don’t have a lot of traction when it comes to thought leadership and they need to invest in doing that or they will lose some ground. That said, they’ve graduated from the new kid on the block to the young adult making their way in the world successfully early on. They are currently an SMB player, to be sure; not an enterprise threat, but I wouldn’t put that past them someday.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
