Did you miss the latest upgrade from Zoho? Maybe you blinked — in fact, you may have missed more than one.
Zoho, the upstart provider of online Web applications, seems to be continually integrating and upgrading its products in the cloud, says China Martens, an analyst with The 451 Group. Martens jokes that it’s as if all of the Zoho developers sit in separate rooms for several months, each one pounding away at his respective application (Zoho Mail, for example, or Zoho CRM), only to have the walls come tumbling down just as the developers are ready to join their applications. Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s key evangelist, says that taking down those application walls is the company’s primary goal. “We are focusing more on integration within native applications,” he says. To date, Zoho offers 10 productivity applications, such as Zoho Mail and Zoho Chat, and nine business applications, such as Zoho CRM and Zoho Invoice.
The productivity suite provider integrates email and CRM, beefs up its Projects application, and entices Salesforce.com users to switch over.