Zoho Good Enough For SOHO

So companies or technologies hitting the market in the era of Exchange and Office, iCal and Google Apps all have an uphill climb. One company that is getting there with a nice stride, though, is Zoho -- a provider of cloud-based, online business applications and tools that are increasingly competitive. A few notes about Zoho:

The company was founded in 1996 and is based in Pleasanton, Calif. It currently delivers 19 separate Web-based applications, from a word processor to spreadsheet to presentation software. But where it parts ways with Google Apps is in the buildout of hosted, business-ready applications.

Most of the business applications come with trial accounts but require subscription fees for regular use. From what we could see, all worked as advertised with a few things to know:

Zoho Meeting

A whiteboard/meeting application that allows for PC sharing, instant messaging and audio chat participation, pricing is subscription-based and scales up with the number of accounts and simultaneous users each account may host. For example, a subscription for 10 accounts, which can each host 10 users, is priced at $18 per month. This tested well in the CRN Test Center lab; we were able to set up PC sharing for an online meeting that synchronized a PC running Ubuntu perfectly with a PC running Windows 7. (Well, perfect except for latency you'd expect for a browser-based application running over the Internet.)

Zoho CRM

This lacks the mobility that rival Salesforce.com provides but, for example, Zoho says an iPhone version of its Zoho CRM will be available soon. For a Web-based, desktop CRM application, Zoho CRM is fine and it works. We first looked at the Free Edition, which was rudimentary but did provide customer data collection and management -- with what is actually fairly robust data capture functionality for a free service. The Enterprise edition, at $25 per user per month, provides extensive and robust administrator and management functions, such as the ability to define workflow rules, build advanced templates and create modules.

Zoho Recruit

Another of Zoho's more recent business applications, Zoho Recruit, is workflow for human resources departments and headhunter companies. It's simple: The application provides the ability to create and track job openings with detailed data capture forms, input and track job candidates, and schedule and prepare for job interviews. It's priced at $12 per month per "recruiter."

Zoho Business

Zoho Business provides command center: a dashboard that sorts and helps you manage all of your Zoho productivity applications, from e-mail to word processing to spreadsheets. The service also provides free e-mail hosting with your custom domain, as well as group collaboration on a variety of Zoho applications -- and looks architected with active workgroups in mind. It's free for the first 10 users in an organization (with 1 GB of storage each); the Professional version will run $5 per month for user number 11 (with 25 GB of storage per user). Each version offers an extra 10 GB of storage for an extra $5 per month.

There's a lot to like about both Zoho's approach and its execution. The company manages a channel program—ZAPP, the Zoho Alliance Partner Program—that provides marketing, sales and technical support. ZAPP isn't open to all VARs, though, but Zoho says it is accepting partners on a case-by-case basis.

The bottom line: After a down-and-dirty look at the Zoho suite, it's clear that it's much more robust than Google Apps, much more obtainable for small or new businesses than many Microsoft applications and it does keep improving. We're not thrilled with every cloud offering we see, but Zoho gets it and its product is built to fit any number of potential solutions. It's a viable business-ready offering.

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