Zoho continues to carve a niche for itself among the giants in the software-as-a-service market. The three-year old online application suite, which started off as a basic online version of Word, has grown to 1.2 million registered users and 500,000 unique monthly logins.
The competes head on with Google in the office productivity space, with 18 applications and 4 “utilities” (Zoho Polls, Zoho Viewer, etc.). And now it will compete with Salesforce’s AppExchange, albeit on a small scale, with a marketplace for third party applications. Developers can now create applications on Zoho Creator and give or sell them to all those users.
The new Marketplace is here and launches officially today after a press leak two weeks ago. The company says that over 100,000 applications have already been built on its Creator platform, most of which are available to all users. Those applications are not being moved over the the Marketplace automatically, but developers will not have the option to do so, and either charge for the apps or give them away for free. Zoho is giving 100% of the fees to developers. There’s also an area of Marketplace that lets users request new apps and features, and developers can choose to respond and create what’s requested.
Zoho continues to forge a path among these much larger competitors, but it clearly isn’t shy about pitching for business. General Electric announced that they’d be using Zoho over Google at the recent Office 2.0 conference. The company has 400,000 desktops, adding to the already large pool of regular users.
Looks like the cloud keeps getting bigger and bigger every day!
Proud of ya Sridhar (AS an indian)! You are KICKING A**
Zoho and their team rocks. But i’m convinced they used a gangle of santa’s elves as slave labor in the off season. They build product faster than it takes me to have sex.
And all of this is done at a very low cost team in chennai India
Way to go!
Jason,
Did I misread or did you suggest that Zoho and their team provide a ganagle of sant’s elves as sex slaves as a motivator for their developers?
Wow that beats neck massages and free food any day.
I applied to be one of the elves and they turned me down, said “your grip isn’t strong enough”
that comment truly deserves to be broken out into it’s own separate post.
what is a sant’s elves anyway? And how much is a ganagel? Are those words? Reminds me of that jabberwocky poem they made us memorize in high school:
http://www.jabb...abberwocky.html
oh wait now I see the original comment. I like the edited one better.
hahahahahaha
I like the potential of Zoho but haven’t use their services regularly due to a few shortcoming but they are being fixed as we speak. I have sent feedback to them twice and both times I received intelligent replies back the next day. They really want to improve their services. I recommend trying Zoho, and if your’e satisfied, return in a couple months to check again.
Go Zoho. I really like this company. Great products and great competitors against Google.
Mike, it is hard to type and prepare for my interview at Zoho.. as Jason says, get a grip and enjoy my creative display of engrish and lingeo!
Zoho once again comes out with an impressive upgraded product at a very low cost for the small business market. Options like Intuit’s Quickbase are way too expensive for SMB’s to consider, and I think Zoho will continue to grow dramatically due to the low cost factor. And Google seems to be falling further and further behind Zoho in the feature race…. I’m still a Google fanboy overall, heavy users of Gmail, Gdocs, Greader, etc. but Zoho keeps tempting me to switch… Grass is always greener kind of situation.
We have watched Zoho grow its suite of business based applications within 1 year and we are using Zoho CRM 3 user version and its simply great, you can automate all your business activities without paying $$$ to salesforce or other applications ….
The Zoho Business edition still needs to cook, but I would recommend Zoho CRM to any small and medium business who is thinking of subscribing to Salesforce … try their 3 users Free offer and you will never return to Salesforce ….
I luv Google products but it has been more than 10 months and I haven’t seen any update on Google spreadsheet or docs etc … come on Google … or maybe Google has recurited elves who don’t have strong grip and hence its slowing down i guess …
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Nice to see Zoho grow. We use it actively for our non-confidential business data, and added an additional layer of automation with it using the iMacros Excel Web connector. That works well.
I cant stand zoho writer, way to cluttered to me and bla… don’t like…. but I give em cred there pushing out new stuff all the time unlike Google, Im starting to get a feel that Google Docs is a forethought.
Yet, googles clean design has always won me over and unless they really start falling behind i won’t move.
Give me some cred from moving away from microsoft office right? lol