Zoho: Thriving Amid the Giants

Like a typical week at Zoho, the past week was filled with lot of activity. We announced integration with Google Apps Sign-in and ofcourse improvements to some of our apps.

What's atypical was the coverage in New York Times (Zoho: Thriving Amid the Giants) which spurred some interesting discussion in the community and revealed some interesting details about Zoho. Many users didn't know that we as a company were around for 13 years, profitable without any external capital. The discussion in Hacker News was particularly interesting where Sridhar provided additional details on how we bootstrapped etc. That entire thread has many nuggets of information and is worth a read.

While we compete with larger companies on some of our apps, we do complement with them on a different set of apps, thanks to our broad application portfolio. ReadWriteWeb is right in assessing that Zoho has more complimentary applications to Google Apps than competing apps. We have seen businesses using Google Apps for Email while using Zoho for CRM, Projects etc.

With this week (and announcement) behind us, we look forward to yet another exciting week (and another announcement ;)) @ Zoho.

Comments

4 Replies to Zoho: Thriving Amid the Giants

  1. Hi,I too had know idea that Zoho has been around for so long...Well, i came across zoho very recently, and i absolutely love the services that you offer....i even posted an article about Zoho on my blog, the link is attached above..Thanks alot for offering great applications!Mehul

  2. Hi,I too had know idea that Zoho has been around for so long...Well, i came across zoho very recently, and i absolutely love the services that you offer....i even posted an article about Zoho on my blog, the link is attached above..Thanks alot for offering great applications!Mehul

  3. As an admirer and user of Zoho (albeit to teach application development ) your post on "Thriving Among Giants" made me wonder on why you have not yet built interfaces with social networks like Orkut and Facebook.
    While Orkut etc may have begun as a gathering of the digital chatterati, the ubiquity and the popularity of these platforms can be leveraged to build more significant applications [ see #.... ] Currently, you need something like OpenSocial [ along with a platform to host your application ] if you want to create user-developed applications inside Orkut [ I understood the challenges while building a Bangla Writer gadget ] but I have also discovered that you can embed Zoho Creator applications inside social networks based on the Ning platform [ see #... ]
    My end game would be to be able to build enterprise class applications in Zoho Creator and embed these inside a social network [ Ning or SocialGo ] and use the mail/alert system that is usually available to create a truly customisable workflow solution.
    This may sound futuristic but actually it is not. All the components are readily available .. and it only needs a savvy systems integrator to put it all together. Perhaps, somebody in Zoho can create a demo that pulls all this together.Think about it.
    Prithwis Mukerjee

  4. As an admirer and user of Zoho (albeit to teach application development ) your post on "Thriving Among Giants" made me wonder on why you have not yet built interfaces with social networks like Orkut and Facebook.
    While Orkut etc may have begun as a gathering of the digital chatterati, the ubiquity and the popularity of these platforms can be leveraged to build more significant applications [ see #.... ] Currently, you need something like OpenSocial [ along with a platform to host your application ] if you want to create user-developed applications inside Orkut [ I understood the challenges while building a Bangla Writer gadget ] but I have also discovered that you can embed Zoho Creator applications inside social networks based on the Ning platform [ see #... ]
    My end game would be to be able to build enterprise class applications in Zoho Creator and embed these inside a social network [ Ning or SocialGo ] and use the mail/alert system that is usually available to create a truly customisable workflow solution.
    This may sound futuristic but actually it is not. All the components are readily available .. and it only needs a savvy systems integrator to put it all together. Perhaps, somebody in Zoho can create a demo that pulls all this together.Think about it.
    Prithwis Mukerjee

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