Thats Interesting

The review team at odinjobs.com showcases up and coming companies and their products. Who knows one of them may be the next Google.

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Does Zoho spell the End of Windows?

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Open source is not only back in business but defining it! Venture capitalists are smiling fondly ($400 million was invested in open source start ups in 2005), revenues are soaring and so are the number of users. Typically plagued by service and user interface issues, the industry is working overtime to align technology to end users’ needs. You have heard of Linux, Firefox, and Red Hat. The list of open source success stories is growing and rapidly challenging application dominance. For the consumer, it is good news all the way. Open source is all about a level playing field, where only innovation and creativity will triumph. Lower costs and access to newer technology will be out there for everyone to enjoy.

For businesses, especially small and medium business, an open source environment could actually mean “click and download” a whole host of applications, either free or for a small fee.

Nothing demonstrates this better than Zoho, a web applications integrated office suite, which is quietly making waves. Zoho combines all Windows Office suite features – Zoho writer (word), Zoho Show (power point), Zoho Sheet (XL) and more. All integrated with online applications like Wiki, chat, notebook, planner and blog. Forget email and attachments, with this new lot you can share anything from a word document to a spread sheet across users online. The suite comes with Windows plug-ins and options for working offline as well. Zoho has opened to rave reviews as a cross between Google Apps and Windows.

The company constantly updates and is adding new applications to complete the suite. AdventNet ,the creators of Zoho, are open source protagonists, although Zoho itself isn’t open source.

As previously stated, web integrated applications will define the IT and the Internet space, just like Windows did in the 80s and 90s. As for Microsoft, perhaps they should focus less on the looming Google Apps and watch out for the small, but no less deadly innovators.

A chat with Zoho

How does Zoho's business model differ from other open source companies?

Zoho is an online services company. There are not many open source companies offering on-demand services compared to open source vendors offering products. If we compare the Zoho services with existing open source services, the business model is the same. There is a monthly charge per user for using our online application.

One of the primary differences between Zoho and other on-demand providers is the depth and breadth. There is no vendor who offers similar breadth of products that Zoho offers.

How do regular launches of new products every few weeks help Zoho?

We want to provide a suite of applications to small and medium size business. We need to offer most of these applications to complete our suite and we are in the process of adding applications to complete our offerings. In this process, we keep releasing new applications regularly. Typically this happens every month and we keep attracting new users for every application we release. Apart from releasing new applications, we also update our existing application on a weekly basis. All these updates are necessary as the applications are maturing for business use.

Who are your ideal clients?

Our ideal clients are SOHOs (Small offices and Home Offices) and small & medium size businesses who cannot afford to have an IT person on board. For these small businesses, we offer affordable applications. Of course, all our applications are free for individuals.

How does the release of Microsoft Vista affect the open source industry and your company?

Zoho applications are not open source. However, we use and contribute to a lot. We run on Linux, use MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and many other open source components. For Zoho, Microsoft's Vista doesn't mean anything. We just need to support the latest version of IE. I doubt if Vista will have a major impact on open source industry. Linux versions like Ubuntu are gaining good traction and are good for most of the common uses. As I use all operating systems, I use Mac, Linux and Window which every machine is in front of me. For me, personally, I don't need Vista.

Where do you see open source solutions going in the future?

Currently open source solutions are very good on the implementation side. But most of these solutions are not very good on the usability and user interface. There are commercial open source solutions that do a good job here, but they don't have the open source spirit. I think open source applications will move towards improving the user interface aspects going forward.

Tell me more about Zoho Challenge & how does it compares to application tracking systems?

Zoho Challenge is for students taking tests. Site24x7 is for application tracking. We have a very vast experience in application, website monitoring systems. The parent company AdventNet has more than 25 applications (www.manageengine.com) in this area and Site24x7 is offered as a service to bring in this functionality. We added this as part of the Zoho suite as it is going to come together in the big story.

How does Zoho Polls compare to Survey Monkey?

Survery Monkey focuses on data gathering and analysis. Zoho Polls is a very simple application that allows users to conduct simple polls online which can be embeddable. The target market is different in most of the cases.

How is Zoho Chat different than other online chat solutions?

Zoho Chat was created to provide instant collaboration functionality across Zoho applications. It doesn't compete with existing online chat applications. But this will be integrated across all Zoho applications. For example, if you are working on a document and need to chat with others working on the same document at the same time, Zoho Chat is used here. It'll be integrated into all Zoho applications.

Our Take On IT

Zoho vs Google Apps vs Microsoft -- as experienced by odinjobs.com

For startups like odinjobs.com that don't have an IT budget to spend on software licenses, web apps is perfect. This is what you get with web apps, its accessible from anywhere (with an internet connection), upgrades/modifications are automatic and it has built in collaboration. Our team is dispersed and collaboration is key, in the old times we would have gone with MS project server and collaboration software from them and paid a hefty license and have the headache of maintaining the system. With web apps, we can concentrate on our business, matching the right IT jobs to a job seeker.

We use Google apps for docs and spreadsheets and Zoho for project management and it is working out brilliantly. We experimented with Dot Project (open source project management), but the problem was more of maintenance and support and we did not have the manpower to maintain another system. Zoho was built on Dot Project, the interfaces are exactly similar to Dot Project, but its hosted, maintained and supported. Google Apps is perfect for sharing documents and spreadsheets. Now a days rather than emailing documents/spreadsheets we just update google apps.

Zoho's PM may not have the bells and whistles of Microsoft project , but really how many people use them? For majority of the users who want to track tasks, milestones, and projects Zoho is easy to use and to start off it is free. Zoho offers different pricing offers based on data stored, number of users, etc. A friendly word of advice- come up with a business model that does not depend on charging based on data size and users as "office suite" is becoming a commodity and is surely going the way of the IDE (Nobody sane pays for development environment anymore).

My guess is that corporate adoption will be slow, as IT departments will raise data security and data privacy issues and they are valid, but for smaller companies it is a trade off between those concerns with a trouble free & hassle free availability of the system.

What do you think of Zoho?

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 01:38AM Mar 16, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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