We are delighted that Swisscom (incumbent telco in Switzerland) has chosen Zoho for a six month pilot for its Zoho Business Suite which is now available on their Software-as-a-Service portal Teamnet.

Zoho and Swisscom have teamed up to create a custom version of Zoho Business, with Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting now available to its 300,000 business customers. Even though Swisscom is the incumbent telco operator in Switzerland, it is taking a bold approach by extending its offerings to the SaaS space.

Increasingly, Service Providers are looking to add value on their existing networks and have started to include online applications like Zoho to their portfolio of services. In the past, one would not turn to the telephone company for productivity applications, but this is changing with the wider adoption of SaaS in the marketplace. We are glad that Swisscom is taking a lead in this regard and will keep you posted on other developments and partnerships as this trend picks up momentum in coming months.

"The goal of the pilot is to provide our business customers with a value added web offering they can evaluate as part of a turnkey solution from their service provider. Zoho is an ideal partner that combines a wide and very innovative range of applications as well as a very solid engineering team to deliver the capability we wanted." said Michael Gmuer, Head Business Process Optimization of Swisscom.".

Zoho and its Alliance Partner Program offer service providers multiple paths to increase ARPU (average revenue per user), the holy grail that telcos seek to maximize by adding additional services to their existing infrastructure. The program offers partners a flexible means to bundle various Zoho services for both consumers and business users.

While we are starting small with the Swisscom project, it is a significant step towards a broader Zoho distribution channel in Europe. This follows our recent partnership with Baihui in China.

Thank you Swisscom for choosing Zoho and for your investment in the project. We look forward to feedback from your users and to a successful venture together.

Last week, we announced Huddle-Zoho Integration. Now, Business Process Management (BPM) software maker, RunMyProcess has become our latest API partner.

According to their CEO : "RunMyProcess is the glue needed by enterprise IT when extending to the web: deploying a web based CRM is a matter of days, but leaving it unconnected from the rest of IT is a matter of serious operational risk. The risk of unconnected web solutions can be avoided in a few ways: spreadsheets, accounting or CRM solutions can be linked to daily exchange rates, parcel delivery follow-up or customer scoring services, all of them mixed with human tasks for critical, non automated steps."

Here's a brief demo of how integration with Zoho helps RunMyProcess connect the dots. This is another great example of an API partner integration as well as the expansion of an ecosystem, with Zoho Creator as the catalyst for easy workflow and functionality. We’d like to thank RunMyProcess for integrating Zoho.

If you are planning to integrate Zoho into your application, please do let us know and we’ll be glad to help you. Other partners who integrated Zoho are listed here.

Zoho is extremely pleased to announce our newest API integration partner; National Paralegal College.

The college is one of the leading providers of online paralegal education nationwide. NPC has pioneered the use of interactive web-conferencing in a classroom setting giving students the benefit of a traditional classroom experience over the internet. At NPC, students earn a paralegal Certificate or Associate degree entirely online.

Avi Katz, NPC President writes: "In keeping with its spirit of instructor-student interactivity, NPC has become an integration partner with ZOHO for the use of ZOHO Writer and Sheet in student submissions of assignments and homework. Instructors can easily share student submitted documents and make comments and corrections directly on the student’s submissions. This has lead to the furthering of interactivity between instructors and students in an Internet-based environment rivaling that of a traditional classroom setting."

The integration with Zoho:

All assignments and student submissions are composed and viewed using the Zoho remote API. Students and professors have the choice of either uploading a file to Zoho or using the Zoho interface to compose their work.

Here is a detailed video demo of the integration:

Zoho and Education:

Zoho continues to enrich the lives of students, faculty and researchers from all over the world - providing an excellent bridge between education and a broad range of easily accessible online tools for learning, collaborating and the creative process. To date, there are approximately 150,000 educational users of Zoho.

A recent appearance in DePauw University newsletter highlights the successful partnership between Zoho and the education community:

"Zoho writer and presentation allow users to import documents from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to be edited or shared, and a plug-in is available to work with Excel as well.Like the Microsoft Office suite, all of Zoho’s tools integrate and work better together. Unlike Office, Zoho allows multiple users to share and edit documents simultaneously from any computer with Internet access.

In addition to integrating with each other, all Zoho applications can be integrated with Facebook, an increasingly helpful feature for college students, faculty and staff."

About the API program:

Zoho is committed to providing open access to as many of its online application services as possible. Through our free API program, partners and the general Zoho community of users can embed the selected Zoho services into other applications, websites, portals and intranets. To date we have API's for Writer, Sheet, Show, Planner and Creator. Other applications will follow.

We are interested in featuring more integration partners. If you have already done an API integration with Zoho and would like us to share it with the world, please write to us and let us know: partners@zoho.com or check out our partner pages at: ZAPP.

Online O/S vendor G.ho.st has integrated Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show into its virtual desktop application giving users the ability to open, edit and save their documents using Zoho while providing 3Gb of free online storage. The partnership is another great example of the use of Zoho's API's and the openness of our Zoho Alliance Partner Program (ZAPP). We are extremely pleased with the integration and welcome G.ho.st to our family of Alliance partners. G.ho.st plans on expanding its offerings in the near future making its virtual desktop a browser-based alternative to MS Windows - and Zoho's collaboration and sharing functionality makes it a great fit.

Thank you G.ho.st team for choosing Zoho and for joining ZAPP! Good luck with the launch and we look forward to lots of positive feedback from our users.

Below is a view of a Zoho Writer document in G.ho.st.

Zoho is very pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Entrepreneur.com. The alliance combines Zoho’s suite of online collaboration tools with some of the best business content on the Web. The result is a new section of the Website called Entrepreneur Assist, an industry-first solution designed to provide entrepreneurs and business owners with cutting edge tools to stay more competitive and productive. Visitors to the site can now open business templates and forms right in their browsers, edit and share the documents from a personalized home page at no cost. The deal also is a big boost to our emerging Zoho Alliance Partner Program (ZAPP), which will be formally launched in a few weeks.

Here’s a quick introduction to the site and partnership from Entrepreneur.com Vice President Dave Pomije:

A few quick highlights about the site:

Entrepreneur.com is the Internet’s largest small business site, with millions of unique visitors per month. It features articles, advice and now editable business forms and templates, totaling more than 200,000 pages of content.

With content providers looking for new ways to monetize web site traffic, we will be closely watching the time users spend on the website. This metric may prove to be one of the key advantages that Zoho can provide to any content provider since sponsors of these sites covet longer engagement times spent with their audiences. With Zoho, people naturally spend longer times on a site to create, edit and collaborate on their documents. Stay tuned for more on this.

Maybe some of you haven't heard of this award, but its a real honor for us. Its Paul Greenberg's brain child, best selling author of CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century, we are in pretty good company competing for the honor with Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Neighborhood America and Reardon Commerce.

The finalists were distilled from a list of over 100 vendors, further refined to about 40 before six were selected. While Paul's focus is on CRM, the most interesting aspect of the award is his sweeping view of the marketplace focusing on companies that have or could have a disruptive impact on the industry this year.

According to Paul: "They (Zoho) get the 2.0 world that we're dealing with now so they get how to handle the new generations of customers and business people – which puts them ahead of most of the companies that vie for the small business space. They are constantly innovating with new ideas for products and services. In other words, they may be at the Sundance Festival right now, but they have a serious shot at an Oscar. Watch these guys closely. Real closely".

While Zoho CRM is not as well known as some of our competitors it gets top marks from a growing customer base and will continue to build momentum. Stay tuned for alot more coverage on this dynamic product.

For a recent CRM roundup and review, check out Ismael's ITRedux
Here's a link to the full Steppin' Out finalist award post.