Microsoft Office Alternative Connects Online
The VAR Guy caught up with Vegesna at Interop in Las Vegas on May 23. Among the meeting highlights, Vegesna mentioned:
Some pundits think Google’s online applications are the biggest threat to Microsoft’s Office revenue. But another online office suite, from privately held Zoho, is also reaching a critical mass of users, according to Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna.
The VAR Guy caught up with Vegesna at Interop in Las Vegas on May 23. Among the meeting highlights, Vegesna mentioned:
- Zoho has quietly attracted 250,000 registered users for its online applications, which include a word processor, spreadsheet, CRM software, Wiki, email and plenty more. Many of the applications are free. Some involve a per-user or per-project fee.
- Zoho’s parent, AdventNet, has roughly 650 employees but could have roughly 1,000 by year’s end.
- All of Zoho’s developers are in India, which means the company continues to benefit from lower wage scales than most U.S.-based software firms.
- Zoho was one of the first 50 customers of Salesforce.com. But Zoho considered the CRM system too expensive for the typical small business–and the company therefore decided to launch a CRM system of its own.
- By year’s end, Zoho will likely introduce an online business suite that allows users to manage all of their productivity tasks.
Vegesna was refreshingly down-to-earth. He spoke about Zoho matter-of-factly, demonstrating several tools and describing the company’s vision: “Microsoft Office set the gold standard for desktop office suites, and we want to set the standard online,” he noted.
Hmmm. The VAR Guy already uses Google’s online applications quite a bit. But starting today, he’s going to investigate Zoho’s growing suite of alternatives.
[…] Share/E-mail […]
[…] 8. Coopetition Returns. Former Novell CEO Ray Noorda coined this term in the 1990s. You better come to understand it. Fast. Coopetition is when you both compete and cooperate with a technology company, in this case Microsoft. When describing its hosted services, Microsoft says it is #8220;providing business customers with the flexibility to choose between traditional on-premise implementations, services hosted by Microsoft partners and now Online services that reside in Microsoft’s datacenters.#8221; Hmmm. 7. Office Live Workspace: Access and edit your documents online. Not a big worry for MSPs, but certainly a counter offering to Google#8217;s online applications and similar applications from Zoho.com. (Full disclosure: We#8217;re big fans of Zoho.) […]