Our CEO was interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

You can also view the interview and the transcript here . The related Hacker News thread is here .

Take the Google Apps marketplace announcement yesterday. At that event, there were plenty of demonstrations on how contextual integration works across vendors. Notable ones include Intuit Online Payroll integration with Google Calendar, Atlassian Jira.com integration with GMail/Docs/GTalk, and of course our own Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects integration with GMail/Docs. It is fair to say that every single case of integration demonstrated at the launch even yesterday takes the cloud based ecosystem functionality ahead of where traditional enterprise systems are capable of today. Even more important, we completed our integration with Google in under 2 months, even while they were still refining their APIs. We thank the Google team once again for inviting us to be a launch partner.

Why do we want to integrate with Google Apps? The most important browser tab, in a business context, is the one dedicated to email. Given that GMail is the cloud email provider of choice by far, it is natural for Zoho to integrate our suite with GMail and Google Apps. While we agree with Marc Benioff on enterprise apps taking design inspiration from Facebook (well, not too much inspiration, we are not sure we want to go around "poking" our customers!), we would also like to point out that email is where the majority of business users spend their time. Of course, given that Salesforce has no email strategy, it is natural for them to try to redefine the market away from email and towards social networking. This is Salesforce's third attempt at making their CRM a business app platform, but unfortunately for them, email is a far more natural starting point than CRM - we say that as a company that has a strong CRM suite. Besides, to be a real platform, you have to have a degree of openness, and our experience with Salesforce demonstrates the opposite, and sets up a direct contrast to Google's platform approach.

Now, what exactly is contextual integration? In a nutshell, contextual integration allows for the most relevant information to surface up to the user, regardless of where that information is stored. For years, if you wanted to get information on customers, you had to go to your CRM system. If you wanted to get information on employees, you had to go to your HRIS system, if you wanted to read email, you went to your email client.

The cloud is going to fundamentally change that. With contextual integration, everything comes together - emails, calendars, documents, CRM systems, project management, HR, accounting, all of it - all from within one single tab. In this new vision, application boundaries become fluid, in fact applications in the traditional sense take the back seat, and the user's workflow and context dominate. The benefits are enormous, both for individual business users, as well as for IT organizations. Individual users can get more done faster, with tools that get out of their way. IT organizations reap enormous productivity gains in systems integration.

That second point, systems integration, is an important one. The vast majority of IT spending goes to systems integration/professional services. It is well known in the industry that in the old software model, licensing costs represent only 20-30% of the initial cost. But in the SaaS world, we are already seeing how much easier it is to share data among different, disparate systems. This of course, doesn't mean that system integration costs will entirely go away. In particular, enterprise customers will still need to hire professional services to connect cloud services to their more intricate, legacy systems they still have in-house. While they might not go away, we fully expect them to substantially decrease. Small and Mid-size customers will even be able to do away with them, as cloud vendors are increasingly pre-integrating each other's systems.

I will acknowledge that contextual integration is still in its infancy, but we (by which I mean the entire cloud ecosystem) are making rapid progress. The important thing to note about cloud applications is that, in the beginning, they were just about replicating the desktop experience. Want an email program? I'll give you one, but instead of on a desktop client, on the web. That was step one. Step two was about improving some of the features that the desktop application provided: more storage, better scalability, better security, etc. But now cloud applications go far beyond that. Contextual integration is an example of how cloud applications - Zoho's and everyone else's - are bringing a whole new wave of productivity and innovation.

Today, Google announced the availability of Google Apps Marketplace where vendors like Zoho can sell applications complementing Google Apps. More information on this announcement is available here and here. Zoho is one of Google's launch partners for Google Apps Marketplace as we integrate two of our business applications - Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects with Google Apps.

Let us directly dive into the meat of the announcement. Starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While we have had some integrations earlier, this time, we take this couple of steps further integrating our Apps at the application and data levels with Google Apps extended APIs.

Installing and Accessing Zoho Apps

If you are the domain admin for Google Apps, you'll now have an option to add Zoho Apps to your domain through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the domain admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation.

Selecting the application in Google universal navigation opens the Zoho application in a new browser tab. When you access the application for the first time, we ask you to choose a Zoho username (one time only). Once done, you'll be logged into Zoho automatically and redirected to the appropriate Zoho Application where you can start using the app.

Integration with Google Apps - Application and Data

In the first version, Zoho CRM & Projects are integrated with Google Apps. There are several integration points with Google products. Here are some highlights...

When you add a Zoho application to a domain, all the apps will be accessible from Google universal navigation and users will automatically be signed into Zoho applications.

• In Zoho CRM for Google Apps, we let Google Apps domain admin choose the users he wants to provide access to Zoho CRM. Instead of creating users from scratch in Zoho CRM, you can now import users from Google Apps
  
• Zoho CRM allows users to import contacts from Google Apps Contacts
  
• If you have our Zoho Mail Add-on enabled in Zoho CRM, you can POP your email from Google Apps to Zoho CRM. These emails show up in the CRM system automatically for each contact. Emails sent from Zoho CRM will also show up in Gmail in Google Apps. This is a unique integration of its kind between Zoho CRM & Google's GMail.
• Zoho CRM & Projects integrate with Google Apps Calendar. Google Apps users will now be able to subscribe/view their CRM & Projects events right within Google Calendar
• Zoho Projects and all modules in Zoho CRM let you attach documents directly from Google Apps
  
• We also have multiple OpenSocial gadgets for CRM & Projects which can be embedded in Gmail, Google Sites and other apps that accept OpenSocial embeds

These bullet points won't do justice to the tight integration we have with Google Apps. Here is a video & a Zoho Show presentation that explains this integration in detail between Zoho CRM and Google Apps.

At Zoho, we have a broad set of apps - over 20 Online Business, Productivity & Collaboration Apps. Yes, we compete with Google Apps, but we have more apps that can complement Google Apps than the apps we compete in. We always made it easier for Google users to try Zoho Apps starting with Google Sign-in followed by Google Apps Sign-in and recent integration with Google Docs. We understand the realities of the market and we have a good overlap in customers using Zoho Business Apps and Google Apps. 

With this integration, we welcome Google Apps users to try our complementary business applications. We will continue to improve our integration with Google Apps and you'll find additional Zoho Business Apps available in Google Apps Marketplace moving forward.

We would like to thank Google Apps Marketplace team for providing us the opportunity to be a launch partner and providing us early access to the APIs. We hope this integration will be mutually beneficial and more importantly useful for our customers. As always, we are looking forward to your feedback.

Links

 As you may have gathered, both the Professional and Enterprise editions of Zoho CRM offer a great deal of value. There are plenty of fields, a great deal of functionality and very good granular security. What sets Zoho apart from some of its competitors, however, is the breadth of its offering. While the Zoho CRM Professional edition is very robust and a great value for the money, it becomes substantially more effective when used in combination with other Zoho offerings. To give you just one example, combining Zoho CRM with Zoho email and Zoho Docs gives you robust CRM, integrated email that includes email storage, plus an integrated online entry-level document management solution at an unbeatable price. Add Zoho Business (email hosting plus an Office suite) and you have a fully functional online set of productivity applications, including calendaring functionality.

Transitions and animations have been one of the most requested features for our online presentations product, Zoho Show. We're happy to release them today. We've added 30 slide transitions and 5 in-slide animations that you can add to your Zoho Show presentation. And just in case you are wondering, when you import a Powerpoint presentation that has transitions, we do import those with it. Same thing when you export a presentation. You will find the transitions & animations menu on the right-hand side in the Zoho Show UI (next to where the Shapes and Themes are, see below).

More than just writing about them, I thought it'd be more appropriate to embed a small Zoho Show presentation where you can see them in action. Transitions and animations (all 30 of them) work whether you're in Slideshow mode or whether you embedded the presentation in a web page.

Since we are talking about embedding a presentation, you might want to check out our embedding options. We've re-designed the entire process to not only add more options, but also make it super easy for you to embed the presentation in your site and have it look just like you wanted. Now, when you go to Publish->Embed, you'll notice there is an "Advanced Options" link. Here you can easily control -no HTML tweaking needed- the size of your embedded presentation, whether you want controls on it, and several other options.

That's not all. We also just released support for Google Chrome in Zoho Show. Previously, you were only able to view presentation when using Chrome. Now, you can also edit them. We are a big fan of Chrome's stability, speed and what it means for online applications like ours. So this was of course a natural step for us.

Rodrigo

Edwin Boender has a post titled 'Better than Google Apps?'. He's just discovered Zoho and he appreciates all we have on offer.

Sometimes you just get dumbfounded when finding out new features on the web. Last week I found Zoho.com. An online application provider, providing productivity, business and collaboration apps. Almost any common application is provided by Zoho. And Zoho’s pricing for individuals is free, just like Google Apps. The thing is; you get a bunch more of apps comparing to Google. From CRM to a Project app and from a marketplace to a database app.

Edwin then comments about our pricing,

When you are looking for professional edition the pricing method seems fuzzy. For every app you need to pay a certain amount per user per month. Sudden[ly] the cloud app doesn’t seem to be that cheap.

'What does it cost me?' Edwin and all small and medium businesses (SMBs) evaluating Zoho as their solution have this question on their minds. We take pride in offering a transparent pricing model. Clicking on the Pricing link at the top of any of Zoho's service pages will get you our pricing plans. The embedded Zoho Sheet below is to illustrate what the subscription costs are for businesses with 10, 25 and 100 employees.

This should have given you some perspective. For example, if your organization has 100 employees, you spend around $18 per employee per month for using all the functionality that the integrated Zoho services offer (note that this is just a sample calculation and your exact costs may vary).

Zoho's services are available à la carte and you can pick them based on your business needs. Since all Zoho services are offered under monthly subscription plans, you pay as you go and there's no initial cost involved. If you subscribe annually, you get discounts for most of Zoho's services too. All this should make Zoho an attractive solution to run your business on.

• Video: What is Zoho?

February is the month when teams in Zoho gear up for the annual cricket tournament, The Zoho Cricfest. The Cricfest's been conducted every year since 2001 & has become a part of Zoho's annual schedule of events. It's become so huge now, that 3 cricket grounds are needed to accommodate all the teams & matches. Like with last year, the Cricfest happened over the weekend (Feb 27 & 28) at the Madras Christian College (MCC) grounds this year too. Some of the best moments captured on camera as a Zoho Show slideshow below.

Photo credits to Jawahar Babu, Vinod VV & Ken.

There's this saying in India,"If cricket's a religion, Sachin is God". The exploits of this 5' 5" Little Master (he also goes by other names like Master Blaster & Batting Maestro) over the past two decades can't be summed up that easily. His latest - becoming the first batsman in One Day Internationals history to score a double century! We have made an attempt to crunch all those runs that Sachin has piled on over his impressive cricketing career using Zoho Reports. Click on the below image to visit the dashboard.

• Sachin Tendulkar Database