CRM is a really valuable tool that only now has become available to those on the smaller end of the business spectrum.
Zoho is hosting a free webinar on “CRM Best Practices” in a few days. Most of you know that Zoho sponsors the other place I blog, you’ll also know that I’m not scared to criticise their products when I see fit. In any case talking about this webinar can hardly be deemed to be commercial given that Zoho are actually giving away attendees a three seat Zoho CRM licence – for life!
Anyway – details below – if you take part I’d be keen to hear your thoughts – good, bad or indifferent.
When: October 24, 2008 at 1.30 pm (10.30 PST)
Topic: Leveraging Web-based CRM to Improve Customer Interactions While Building Value for your Growing Business
In this interactive webinar, we will use Zoho’s award-winning online CRM application to demonstrate how easy and affordable it is to improve your sales and marketing activities simply by leveraging the power of the web and some great features in this product.
Zoho CRM benefits for Small Business include:
♦ Most affordable web-based CRM solution on the market, only $12/user/month
♦ Flexible and easy set-up makes it a breeze and cost effective to get started
♦ Track and manage sales. marketing, inventory and support gaining 360 degree view of your business
♦ Improves control and security of company information with built-in role based access to CRM data based on user privileges
♦ Gain customers with built-in mass e-mail and marketing campaign management to generate leads and track results
♦ Improve your business efficiency with a system that is designed to scale as your business grows.
Register now to attend this free, interactive webinar to find out how Zoho CRM can benefit your Small Business.
Zoho is launching their application marketplace today. Like other similar offerings, the Zoho location is a place where customers can come and browse different applications, try them out and buy them (or get ‘em for free in some cases). Think of it as iTunes for apps.
The difference between Zoho’s offering and those of other players, is in keeping with the differences between Zoho and its competitors in other marketplaces – and it’s a difference which has garnered them attention a little disproportionate to their size. Instead of charging users for application from the marketplace – Zoho passes them on at whatever cost the developer wants (including free if necessary). Zoho is happy with the potential of some downstream revenue created from the fact that the applications are created on their own product, Zoho Creator, and if users go over a certain level their is a charge for use of that product (bear in mind that their pricing kicks in at a pretty high level – for 10 Apps shared with less than 5 users, Zoho Creator is free.). It’s kind of like Apple not charging for downloads from iTunes – secure in the knowledge that they make coin off of selling iPods!
So far the range of applications in the marketplace is a little limited (it only launched today after all) but the different categories give you a taste of what can be done, and what’s to come. Zoho’s rationale for creating the marketplace goes like this;
There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf, but are needed in a particular use case or situation, but there is not enough market for vendors to offer such situated software as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business.
Zoho Marketplace is trying to address this particular need. This market is not big enough for vendors to make a living and not small enough to ignore. With Zoho Marketplace, we hope to connect developers directly with users to create and purchase such applications providing a platform in Zoho Creator.
It’s great to see an alternative to the salesforce and Google offerings and it’ll be interesting to see how the marketplace develops over time.
Check out the video below (a little cheesy admittedly but interesting nonetheless!) and the somewhat more serious one further down.
Disclaimer – Zoho is sponsor of one of my other gigs, and I help them out on a bit of stuff. Suffice it to say if their product sucked I wouldn’t use it or promote it!
I was a little surprised when I saw this post by Rodrigo over on the Zoho blog. The title struck me as a little strange coming from someone who works for a business that is pushing the SaaS boundaries – what was he up to saying that Software + Services has beaten SaaS?
Of course reading further, I found that Rodrigo was referring to the operating system and browser as being the only two pieces of software needing to be installed. But the sentence that resonated with me was this one;
As for me, I use Windows Vista. Certainly not because I wanted to, but because Microsoft forced me to get Vista on my new Dell machine. So I’m stuck with it. I was apprehensive about using Vista … but after a few days I got used to it. Wanna know why? No, it’s not because Vista is good – it’s because it doesn’t matter. The underlying operating system you use is irrelevant. 99% of the time I’m at a computer
Of course it’s a theme I’ve talked about often in the past – the fact that most of us spend most of our time within a browser, rendering the operating system pretty much irrelevant.
After spending time at the Office 2.0 conference, and exploring the multitude of offerings available out their on-demand for businesses, it makes me excited for the future of business and the future of the web. I’m looking forward to exploring current and future offerings, and studiously ignoring the fact that I even have an operating system!
It’s a little bit later than expected but at last I’m happy to announce the creation of CloudAve. Along with a great team of writers and researchers, Zoli Erdos as editor in chief and myself as editor will be creating what we hope will become the pre-eminent location for cloud computing and SaaS analysis and commentary. We will be specifically focusing on SaaS tools for business.
Originally slated to launch during the recent Office 2.0 conference, lots of busy-ness, a few technical issues and a general high degree of chatter at that time made us decide to delay until next Monday. We’re posting about it now to allow people to subscribe to our feed, all ready for our content to come floating over the pipes.
Our vision with CloudAve (in fact it’s part of our manifesto) is that it should start and remain ad free – in order to pay its way then Zoho has come on board and is sponsoring the site. Have no fear though – their sponsorship is completely hands-off when it comes to editorial independence – we’ll tell it like we see it – no matter who we catch in the crossfire!
So where to for Diversity? I’ll be posting a little less often here, and my posts will probably be more around the themes of New Zealand business, economic development, manufacturing, broadband issues and the like (in fact similar themes to where my blogging started) – my co-contributors to Diversity will continue to post here as and when they see fit.
I’ve also got a few interesting projects coming up in the next few months around the New Zealand telecommunications industry, small business development in New Zealand and the like. So stay tuned – there’ll still be stuff of interest.
But also head over to CloudAve, with the talent we have on board we’ll begin to amass a pretty compelling resource.
Zoho is launching Zoho docs today at the Office 2.0 conference. In essence Zoho Docs is a central place to manage all your personal documents. The same way Windows explorer helps manages your desktop files.
It’s got all the good drag-and-drop goodness you’d expect from an explorer type product, integrates chat and also supports sharing within groups.
I’ve said it often before, and Rod also commented on how Google Chrome helps in this respect, but more and more of the core functionality of the operating system is being disintermediated by browser based offerings – I hate to foretell doom (actually I love to but you get the drift) but repent now operating system makers, for the end is nigh!
Zoho CEO Sridhar wrote this excellent post about why Zoho plays in the office productivity space, but why Google only will do up to a point.
The gist of his post is that for Google, docs is a low margin offering compared to their traditional business. Therefore docs moves Google down the margin food chain and there need to be reasons for doing it other than pure profit generation. Clearly there are some strategic reasons for Google to do docs – anything that lets them eat some of Microsoft’s lunch is a good thing, and they also want to give the SaaS office productivity pace a leg-up to damage MS further.
For AdventNet however (AdventNet is the parent company of Zoho), office productivity docs are a move up the margin food ladder – as such it an especially attractive direction for a business that is purely self-funded.
I’d not be surprised (but have zero way of knowing) if there haven’t been high-level discussions between Zoho and Google – they both have distinct markets and would both benefit from tipping MS off it’s own throne.
For those either attending the Office 2.0, or in San Francisco next week – just a note that Zoho will be hosting a party to both celebrate their millionth user milestone and to announce a couple of new things.
The party will take place at;
Vitrine @ St. Regis (4th Floor) 125 3rd St San Francisco CA
The party starts @ 6PM on Sep 4th.
If you’re planning on going, fill out the form here.
The guys at Zoho needed some real world examples to show off their on-demand offerings. They’re also pretty interested in the Olympics. Put the two together and you have this cool 2008 Olympics dashboard.
It’s been put together with a bunch of different Zoho offerings and shows some insightful stats and charts of medals for the Olympics.
Check it out – just don’t expect to see New Zealand’s name up there – we’ve not won any medals yet
Raju from Zoho flicked me an email which was embargoed until right now (assuming I’ve got my time zones right – otherwise this is either a scoop or old news ) to tell me that they’ve just gone over the one million user number. That’s a million users in less than three years with a nicely steepening demand curve.
Zoho isn’t yet releasing details of what, in my opinion, is the acid measure – how many paid users they have. It’ll be interesting to see those figures when they come out.
For those who will be attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the first week of September, Zoho will be holding a party to celebrate the milestone (and some further announcements to be made closer to the time) – more details on that soon!
Here’s the Zoho apps user numbers graph displaying the beginnings of the often lauded hockey-stick curve!
I got a heads up from Zoli that Zoho business is now live. This comes on the back of the announcement by Zoho that Swisscom, Switzerland’s second largest telco, is using Zoho for it business applications requirements. Zoho has created a customised version of their applications and this has been made available to Swisscom’s 300000 customers.
Zoho business is a lovely little (or not so little) offering that includes office productivity, calendaring, contact management and mail. All in all it is a one-stop-shop for businesses basic software needs I’ll post specifically about Zoho business later.
Apparently Swisscom also use Gmail for their email needs which in itself is interesting – most Telco’s have gone the way of Microsoft hosted email solutions, it’s noteworthy that a telco, that is generally abut selling top shelf offerings, would go the way of free.
Swisscom have created a SaaS portal, Teamnet, which is pretty much the sort of aggregative SaaS platform that I posted about recently. Swisscom makes available the following offerings;
Zoho business apps
Teamspace collaboration service
Trust room conferencing services
Easy CRM
Project tracker
Teamnet is free until October 2008, thereafter Swisscom will begin charging for the services. It’s a very smart move for a Telco – their traditional revenue stream is being decimated, they’re generally good at large scale infrastructure projects and they’re totally used to a subscription model revenue stream.
![[Bloglines]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[BlogMarks]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/blogmarks.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[Reddit]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Slashdot]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/slashdot.png)
![[Sphere]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphere.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
It’s a little bit later than expected but at last I’m happy to announce the creation of 
) to tell me that they’ve just gone over the one million user number. That’s a million users in less than three years with a nicely steepening demand curve.
I got a heads up from Zoli that 
