Ian Wenig, Senior Director Strategic Alliances at Zoho got interviewed by Daniel Brusilovsky at the Structure 08 event presented by GigaOm. The interview is now up at Daniel’s Apple Universe podcasting site.

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Thanks to Daniel.

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We are happy to announce that we have been selected to unveil our new product at DEMO 07: a pinnacle event with the unparalleled reputation of identifying the best-of-the-best and the real trends-in-the-making.

If you are attending DEMO, please drop me a line. I’d love to chat with you during the conference.

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Thanks to Craig Cmehil’s invite for the SDN day, Hyther & me are here at the SAP campus in Whitefield, Bangalore.

It was a revelation of sorts of how big a community SDN is! Thanks to Bangalore’s traffic woes, we started a bit late and Craig had a micro intro. Mark Yolton, VP of SDN/BPX, gave the initial presentation titled “What have we been up to (together) this year”.

The SDN team is 35 strong and some of them were present - Mark, Craig, Marilyn, Marco (the only Dutchman was the joke), Uri, Anil, Anand and others. The invitees included SAP employees, partners (all the developers whose life revolve around SAP) and a couple of customers. Craig & team had done a pretty good job and the mix was perfect.

The numbers quoted be Mark were staggering. 600K SDN members, 80K from India alone (only US & Germany have more). And SDN had to split to make room for the Business Analysts & Consultatnts to form a new community, BPX - Business Process Experts. They too have grown to 60K with 12K members being added every month. (Mark is targeting 75K users by this year end and 1 million by 2010)

SDN has this system where members can earn points. The system works this way - you have a question and post it to SDN, someone comes up with an answer and you (or anyone) can award him/her some points. Naturally, Craig had made sure that he’d invited some pretty big earners of good karma to the SDN day. Among today’s participants, Kartik Iyengar of Wipro headed the list.

SDN encourages its community by providing freebies, when you cross a certain level you get a T-shirt, the next level, a jacket etc. Most of all, it is the recognition that a SAP developer gets that keeps this community so alive. The SDN community is so vibrant and active that the average time that you have to wait for an answer is just 16 minutes!

Other stats include 61 of the Top 100 Indian companies run SAP, SDN has a unique monthly visitors count of around 400K and weekly views of 1.6M. There is small growing community of bloggers too (600 to 800, Mark was not sure of the number) who write at SDN Blogs.

Those are some points I’m left pondering about, dreaming about a similar Zoho community to form when more Zoho apps go out of Beta, open up our APIs, get a more viral traction. SDN is social networking at its best. They proved it once again through the “Speed Networking” session where we got to interact with the other participants. Even we guys from Zoho who were literally the only ‘outsiders’ felt at home meeting all these cool people. Kudoes to the SDN team and all its members for making this happen!

Hyther being the tech guy, naturally, is more interested in how Zoho and Web 2.0 can bring in value to a giant ERP soultion provider like SAP and enterprise apps in general. And he had a session titled “Enterprise meets Web 2.0″ which was very well received. He will also be part of a panel (think the title is ‘Technology & Innovation’) at the end of the day. Prashanth Rai who will also be part of this panel is blogging too.

May be I will later try updating this post with some photos. Tomorrow, we are again special guests of Craig at the SAP TechEd. Hope to have a great day tomorrow too. And forgot to mention, the arrangements were excellent - a very good internet connection, well organised sessions and nice & spicy Indian food.

Update : As promised, some photos from today’s event (Thanks to Uri, who lent his photos!)

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Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho will be speaking at this year’s Web 2.0 Conference in the session titled ‘SMBx: The Revolution of the SMB Application Marketplace“. Moderated by Tony Perkins, Creator & Editor in chief, AlwaysOn, other speakers of the session include Michael Arrington, Editor, TechCrunch, Dave Ferguson, Engineering Director, Google and Richard McAniff, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Office.

Thanks to Danny Kolke of Etelos which provides hosting of custom web applications, for the invite.

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A few days earlier, Kiruba Shankar interviewed our CEO, Sridhar Vembu. The podcast is up now, click here for accessing it. Lots of insight into services vs products companies in India, venture funding in India now as compared to way back in 1996, how Zoho’s gonna take on Google/Microsoft, desktop vs online security, how blogs have helped spread the word on Zoho etc.

In another interview, Allen Stern at CenterNetworks met up with Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist. The interview concentrates on Zoho’s background & technology behind it, comparison with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Microsoft Office, the future of office products, Zoho’s clients etc. The podcast can be downloaded from here.

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Since Ismael Ghalimi first took the plunge, (anyone out there who did it even before him?), it is becoming quite frequent now for others to try getting rid of one’s desktop based software and live on a strict ‘web-based productivity applications on a browser’ diet. Oliver Rist of InfoWorld is the latest. He lived for a week like that here’s his final verdict :

Zoho is definitely the standout in the group. It’s the only one that not only offers most of the apps I need but also seems to have a clear vision of where it’s going. And it’s free. ThinkFree and gOffice are similar, but neither has the breadth of apps, features, or collaboration that Zoho does.

There are a lot more insights in his very nice & elaborate article titled “Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop?“. Thanks a lot, Oliver & InfoWorld!

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Posted to:  General, In the News, Technology, Zoho Mail, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer  Permalink  Trackback  Post Comment
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This is how it looks…. any guess??

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The ever ‘resourceful‘ Gary Price has a full review of the Zoho suite. From the blog post :

The ResourceShelf team has been a long time fan of the Zoho suite of services and have (of course) mentioned them on the site several times. We’re thrilled to see them getting more and more attention. Just launched, Zoho Show.

Zoho services are more than worth a look (especially for the web-based apps/Web 2.0 junkies out there). Plus, since budgets are always an issue, almost all of Zoho’s web-based services are free.

New: Zoho Show
+ Web based (and free) WYSIWYG presentation creator.

+ Create presentations using content from other Zoho services like Sheets and Writer.

+ Import PowerPoint Presentations or OpenOffice Presentation (.sxi).

+ Examples: Zoho Show #1 and what a Zoho Show presentation might look like.

+ A Zoho Show can be viewed online or exported. Presentations can be made public (here’s an example of a couple of slides I was able to create in about 3 minutes) and then with one click obtain a url. Of course, presentations can also be invite only or totally private. Exporting to HTML is also just a click away.

Zoho Sheet
+ A robust web-based spreadsheet program. Like Zoho Writer you can test the service out without having to register.

+ Supports more than 300 functions

+ Easily create Draw bar/line/pie 2D/3D charts and then it’s only one-click to embed them directly into blog postings or Zoho Writer documents. Example here. Cool!

Zoho Writer
This web-based and increasingly robust product is our web-based word processor of choice. One thing we’ve noticed is that the Zoho Writer is much quicker in all aspects. From logging in, to saving, to outputting. Kudos.

+ NEW: Real Time Collaborative Writing & Editing

Multiple users can work on a document simultaneously.

Very powerful and a potential big time saver especially when a some members of the group are located throughout the world or just a few cubicles away.

+ Another useful feature for those of you who want to learn more about Zoho Writer is how easy it is to use and test the product even before registering (no big deal but a few seconds saved is what many of us want and need). Just login as a demo user. As registered users we also find the new “quick create” feature another plus.

There is menion of other Zoho services as well. Thanks, Gary for your continued support of Zoho!

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Albert F. Case, Jr., at TechSpend makes some good points regarding businesses using web-based software. From his article,

I’ve read a lot about Google’s online spreadsheet and Zoho’s ZohoWriter and related products. I’ve also heard a lot of “Who needs it?” That attitude amazes me. During my “informal” survey of a few dozen Excel users I know exactly 0% used pivot tables and charts! Sure, I know people (like me) who do – but the reality is most don’t. Just like most people using Microsoft Office don’t do much more than write reports in Word, send Email in Outlook and do simple spreadsheets in Excel. Now, at $200 to $400 per person, how many thousands of dollars are spent for licenses of Microsoft Office in a company that has 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 PCs?

He goes on with how a web-based spreadsheet application (like Zoho Sheet) can help a company.

Think of the creative new applications of an online, sharable spreadsheet. A spreadsheet Wiki! The company home phone list can be instantly updated. Prospect lists can be shared. Budgets can be tinkered with in group fashion. I can think of hundreds of uses for this technology in the average corporation.

And, he has this to say about Zoho CRM :

Zoho has some paid applications as well – such as ZohoCRM. $12 per month per user! Whither goest Oracle/Siebel from here? This could be a real challenge to hosted CRM leader Salesforce.com.

Great thoughts, Albert! Like you, we believe more & more people have started realizing the endless possibilities that affordable (and often times free) web-based software like Zoho is creating for businesses around the world.

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Chris Harris, in the August issue of the School Library Journal writes,

Save a document with your desktop word processor and there it sits. Sure, you can move it around using the Sneaker-Net on a USB flash drive or e-mail the document, but there are serious limitations. Save a document using Zoho Writer and it is available wherever you can access the Web. You can share the document with read-only or read/write permissions with a simple e-mail invitation. Or you can make the document public and allow anyone to read what you have written. The options don’t stop there; you can also automatically post it to a blog, export it to a PDF file, or even save it in the standard DOC format for use in Microsoft Word.

So the next time you are collaborating on a project with a teacher down the hall, a librarian across the district, or a national committee, why not try Zoho Writer? Or if your school discourages students from bringing documents from home to school on storage drives, why not introduce students to an online word processor?

The whole article is available here. Thanks, Chris!

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