See our patience - but also our feedback! I look forward to having a two way dialogue with the feedback submissions I have done on the suite of zoho apps I have been using.
One of the most trenchant criticisms of Zoho is the integration (or the lack thereof!) across various applications. A good recent example is a comment by Phil Hodgen in Paul Greenberg's blog:
Zoho's greatest failing for me is that they are splintered all over creation with little integration between what they offer. My suggestion is to stop churning out new products and features and instead put all of those great engineers to use in knitting the pieces into one cohesive whole.
Let me acknowledge this criticism overall, but let me also state that there is a lot of integration work taking place under the hood. Just off the top of my head, a couple of recent examples: a) the "Share" link in Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show now sport a common way of sharing, with contacts fetched from your common Zoho address book, which is also used in Zoho Mail b) Zoho Docs pulls together your documents, spreadsheets, presentations with a convenient viewer for read-only purposes, so just for the sake of browsing your documents, you don't have to load the editor c) Zoho Docs then integrated under the hood with Zoho Share. There are many more integration projects going on.
What is interesting about each of these developments is a) they take a fair amount of work, often measured in several months of development for a team b) they don't make news, sometimes not even a blog post from us. So there is a "news bias" - you may hear about Zoho only when we release (ahem, "churn out") a new product, but there are a lot of incremental, integration oriented updates we make that you never hear about - but you will notice when you use the product!
Now coming to the substance of the criticism, which we acknowledge, let me explain our product management philosophy, summarized by the phrase "depth first". As an example, we intentionally prioritized having a world-class stand-alone CRM offering ahead of integrating that CRM offering with the rest of the Zoho suite. If we had reversed the priorities, we would have shallow products integrated with each other, but individually no product would be really satisfying. Doing integration before a product matures is like getting married too young - your spouse may find you growing up to be someone totally different than the one they married.
Now, there is a subtler, deeper criticism: "What if you visualize the product differently, as an integrated whole, than as the sum of its parts?" This is a great point - if we had all along visualized Zoho as an integrated whole, would we get a completely different result than our "depth first" strategy of developing individual products and then integrating them?
That idea, realizing an integrated whole, is a remarkable seductress, take it from he who knows! But, alas she ultimately leads us to the Turing tar-pit. To quote Raganwald:
What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so general, that the effort to configure it to solve a specific problem matches or exceeds the effort to start over and write a program that solves the specific problem.
I suffer from a tendancy to go swimming in tar. I start out trying to solve a specific problem. I become frustrated with the obvious deficiencies of the tools, and before I know it I’m sketching out ideas for platforms, frameworks, and architectures to solve a whole class of similar problems.
That's why we solve specific problems first, then stitch them together, imperfectly at first, getting better with experience, to form a coherent whole.
Crucially, we keep those specific solutions as direct entry points to Zoho, usable in their isolation. Yes, there are tantalizing possibilities of CRM & Mail together, but we have to recognize and respect the choices customers make. If we tried to force a Zoho CRM customer to use Zoho Mail, we would just lose a lot of customers. So we have to perform the integration in a way that leaves those choices open to the customer - be it Outlook or Thunderbird or GMail, to quote the most common choices. Keeping these direct entry points also permits third parties to integrate just the specific component of Zoho they want in to their solution.
Here is a case where the right thing to do by technology is also the right thing to do for the customers. And as we go about the messy business of integration, we seek your patience!
See our patience - but also our feedback! I look forward to having a two way dialogue with the feedback submissions I have done on the suite of zoho apps I have been using.
I would tend to agree with the "depth first" philosophy, but there are some cases where integration would clearly give you more depth. Most prominently is the integration of Creator and DB & Reports - I don't even know why they're separate products!!! Also, integrating spreadsheets with DB & Reports makes a lot of sense (I realize there some integration already, but it needs to go further).
I am one of those who always ask "for when the integration of CRM and mail," but I understand and agree with the strategy chosen. True, the daily maelstrom prevents many times that we explore in depth the improvements. It will be a matter of patience and be less successful in not get carried away by accounts of colors. It is true that should improve the flow of newness to the publico.Estoy proud to be part of 1% to use Zoho, which he badly despite the competition and their dubious market research jeje. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Soy uno de los que siempre se pregunto "para cuando la integración de CRM y mail¡" pero comprendo y coincido con la estrategia elegida. Es cierto la vorágine diaria evita muchas veces que exploremos en profundidad las mejoras. Será cuestión de tener paciencia y ser menos exitistas para no dejarnos llevar por cuentas de colores. Es cierto que deben mejorar el flujo de novedad hacia el publico.Estoy orgulloso de formar parte del 1% en utilizar zoho, mal que le pese a la competencia y sus dudosos estudios de mercado jeje.
Great strategy, both technologically, and satisfying customers priority needs, and therefore being more effective attracting new customers sooner. Step by step. Slower, but solid. Keep on like this.
i would heartily agree to the need to combine DB and Creator into a single product ... data in creator "forms" should be accessible using SQL joins since forms are ( to the best of my understanding ) tables -- or should be ...
This is not correct....with a correct architecture it is possible to integrate the individual offereings and update that integration as the depth of the products increases. The two are not mutually exclusive. Big products like Siebel and Oracle have got themselves into a mess because they left out integration until relatively late in the product lifetime (I know, I used to work for them). An eye must always be kept on the integration.
Andrew, they are not mutually exclusive, but integration does slow down product evolution. So a time-based trade-off has to be made between depth and integration.
As a Zoho CRM focused partner, I do appreciate the level of features Zoho CRM has achieved, that is really a good basis to promote it. But CRM market (specially in France) is a very competitive market and Zoho CRM integration to Zoho collaborative platform offers a great positionning and allows us to promote your technical expertise on the Web ... so let a lot of local competitors appear as "has-been" companies and evangelize on new "best-practices on the Web". Zoho platform capabilities and innovative approach is a huge differentiator and make prospects more comfident in a quite unknown company (on european markets) as they are highly impressed, specially if they come from IT world. Concerning Zoho Mail integration, your vision is right on an editor's point of view, but again on the customer side, Zoho CRM is attractive for small business companies who have very low budget and don't want to invest on MS/Outlook, that's also part of our debate ! The early-adopters of ZohoCRM are very often anti-Microsoft individuals : so when they ask for synchronization of their e-mails towards Zoho CRM, we have to recommend Microsoft choice ... otherwise they cannot share received e-mails in their CRM. They really don't understand why we are pushing them towards Microsoft tools, as we have a Zoho Mail ! But it seems to be solved very soon ... You're right integration is not often promoted and I have recently discovered on a Monday morning a very useful Zoho Meeting integration from a contact in Zoho CRM, that is very useful for Support and Sales people using Zoho CRM. Congratulations to the team.
[...] of Zoho (Disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is my independent opinion), wrote a blog post addressing the criticism about the lack of integration among the Zoho product offerings. We have [...]
Sridhar, thank you for sharing Zoho's product philosophy around integration. It's refreshing (and frankly unexpected) to see this level of transparency at any level in an organization, much less from the CEO. I won't argue, as some of your other readers have, with Zoho's integration strategy or overall architecture. That said, a seemingly quick & easy win would be to enable basic iframe integration (Salesforce calls them s-controls, Oracle calls them Web Applets, Microsoft calls them IFRAME... but they're all the same.) This very rudimentary capability would open up countless value-added mash-up integration that only your customers and partners can (and will) dream up. Just my two cents. In the meantime, keep up the innovation... and the candor. We love it! http://www.insideview.com/cat-free.html
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