Zoho is about offering Online Business, Productivity & Collaboration applications. These apps are delivered from our data centers serving millions of users worldwide. Apart from our standard public cloud offering, some of our applications are deployed with strategic partners and within large enterprises, behind their firewalls.
We currently have partners like NTT who deployed Zoho in Japan serving the local market. Similarly, Baihui currently offers Zoho Apps in China with a local deployment. Some enterprises have also deployed Zoho Apps behind their firewalls. In all these cases, our apps are deployed on Zoho recommended hardware. What if an enterprise wants to run our apps on a different hardware or VM?
We are excited to announce a new relationship with VMware. Zoho Apps can now run on VMware's vSphere. Enterprises will now have an option to deploy Zoho Apps behind their firewall either on Zoho recommended hardware or on VMware's vSphere. We will be showcasing this new deployment option at VMworld this week at the vCloud Pavilion.
We are excited about this new relationship/offering with VMware and it is great to see the same level of interest from VMware as well. To quote Dan Chu, VP of emerging products and markets, VMware:
Customers are continually looking for ways to simplify their IT environments. For customers that wish to run their Zoho applications on-premise, VMware vSphere™ 4 provides the foundation for delivering these applications as a private cloud service inside their own firewall and datacenter — retaining the Web-based simplicity and efficiency benefits of Zoho’s applications while keeping the applications and data in-house.
For large enterprises, 'keeping the applications and data in-house' is the key. We recently offered 'Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint' along the same lines - keeping the data behind the firewall while taking advantage of cloud applications. Now, with both apps and data behind the firewall, it opens up new integration possibilities with other enterprise applications.
With this new private deployment model, we bring the benefits of cloud applications to enterprises. This deployment option is currently available for businesses with over 10,000 employees.
If you are at VMworld, drop by the Zoho booth at the vCloud pavilion.
KnowledgeTree, an ECM provider who focuses on document management
software is launching their SaaS offering today - KnowledgeTreeLive.
This is a hosted version of their open source online document
management system and it integrates Zoho for editing documents.
With this integration, KnowledgeTreeLive users will have options to create new documents and
view existing documents using the Zoho Editors. When a document is
created/edited with Zoho Apps, the documents are saved back to
KnowledgeTree servers as they maintain complete information about your
documents.
We have a unique set of APIs which let external
applications programatically open documents using Zoho Apps and save
them back to their own servers. Here, 'Saving back to their own servers' is an
important point as it enables some interesting integration scenarios as it fits into the workflow.
We think adding document editing capabilities to other document
management systems is a natural fit. But this need not be restricted to
document management systems alone. To be generic, any
system/application that has documents attached can add value by
integrating document editors for creating/viewing/editing. We have seen
some good integrations already from some of our partners and we
certainly hope to see more such integrations.
We'd like to thank KnowledgeTree for integrating Zoho and looking forward to a long-term relationship.
Document
management systems in many businesses are typically shared network
drives. While some businesses have graduated to online document
management systems like Zoho, a good percentage of them still use
shared network folders or samba drives as their central document
repositories, which sit behind the firewall. This means, their documents
cannot be easily accessed outside the company network.
What
if you need a system to make your existing document management system
accessible outside your network, providing the advantages of an online
document management system and not disturbing your current setup? This
is where Stoneware comes in.
Stoneware provide
web access to your internal infrastructure outside your network through
your browser. Using their webNetwork application, your internal
documents from your
shared network drives can be accessed outside the firewall using just
your browser.
Stoneware integrated our
productivity apps - Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show - into their
webNetwork application. With this integration Stoneware customers can
view/edit their internal documents using just the browser and
save them back to their internal network. After all, there is a reason
they want to keep their data behind the firewall. So this integration
does exactly that. It lets Stoneware users open their internal
documents from existing shared drives
using Zoho Apps and save them back to their internal
network.
This remote saving capability has been available through our Remote APIs and is being used by our other partners like Box.net, Huddle etc.
We'd like to thank Stoneware for integrating Zoho. We certainly look forward for more interesting integrations using our APIs.
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.
Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles. Huddle now integrated Zoho Applications for viewing and editing documents inside their application.
Huddle used our Remote API to integrate Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet. This allows Huddle users to create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets within their familiar interface respecting Huddle's security, permissions and workflow rules.
We'd like to thank Huddle for integrating Zoho and are looking forward to more such integrations. All our API Partners are listed here.
Online Desktop vendor eyeOS integrated Zoho Suite into their application. Currently Zoho Writer and Sheet are integrated into eyeOS. Zoho Show will be integrated after we open up the APIs for creating presentations.
To use the Zoho Apps on eyeOS, you need to install eyeZohoSuite from eyeos-apps.org. Once you have it installed, you'll be able to view your existing documents and spreadsheets from Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet respectively. This also lets you create new documents and spreadsheets as well. eyeOS plans to support opening Open Office documents soon with Zoho Apps going forward.
The following video gives you a quick overview of the integration.
We'd like to thank eyeOS 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.
We are happy to announce a new distribution partner in China - Baihui, a subsidiary of PC Stars - the largest Chinese online distributor with more than 2300 Resellers and over 1000 System Integrators.
With this partnership, Baihui hosts Zoho Applications in China for distribution in China (ofcourse, in Chinese language). These applications will be distributed under Baihui brand. To start with, Baihui will offer the following Zoho applications...
This list will expand going forward. All these applications are currently available @ www.baihui.com.
As with Zoho, Baihui plans to offer these applications free of charge for individuals. Zoho CRM does carry a price tag (99RMB/User/Month) beyond three free users.
While I don't understand any of the stuff in the above screenshot, we are certainly excited to see our apps up there. Almost 50% of our existing users are outside US which is a good sign. We think partnerships like these will extend our reach further.
There are more exciting stuff coming from Zoho. We'll keep you posted.
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.
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