I see no contradiction between best-of-breed competition, and integration. Just as you pointed out, no one is going to switch wholesale to Zoho. Our goal is to offer each customer *something* of value in Zoho, a beachhead from which we will grow. You are a happy Salseforce customer, but perhaps you may want to check out our Zoho Projects or Zoho Meeting – as an example.

Sridhar

Very interesting discussion!

I agree with Gopal’s take on focus, in general. Your examples of Microsoft, Google, et al is very well taken.

That said, in the excellent book “Built to Last” – the authors give example of very successful companies that did a lot of things when they were starting out. I think some examples are HP, Sony, …

So I think there is a case to be made for Sridhar and Zoho as well. :) I wish the very best to them.

Cheers,
Raj
Accompa – Affordable Requirements Management Tool for Product Managers

Thanks for the response. But on one hand you are saying that you are winning your fair share of bake offs against MS, Salesforce.com within a given silo and on the other hand you are saying that your differentiation is the integration across the product suites and this will be the next wave.

But, you cannot expect me as a business customer to drop all of my current applications and switch to Zoho even if Zoho has great integration across its products, correct? I have very good integration across the products in MS Office (yes, they don’t have an online version and that will be their Achilles heel), I am very happy with Salesforce.com – so isn’t it better for you to integrate say your office suite with Salesforce.com and ride on their coat tails to their 40,000+ customer base or integrate your online CRM with Google apps or MS for that matter?

Why would you not want to integrate any of your apps with Intuit’s Quicken or Quickbase since they are the market leaders when it comes to small business financial/database packages? Why would you want to go on your own and take all these behemoths head on by declaring war against all of them all at the same time – fighting one goliath is tough enough for the new kid on the block.

I am not arguing that your business model may be wrong, but I as a potential prospect don’t get it. What I cannot figure out is the beach head you are trying to establish?

Gopal

Here are some facts that might help explain us better in business terms. AdventNet has been in business 12 years, has over 700 people now and has been profitable all along. So we are not really a start-up, and haven’t been for quite some years. We are smaller than (the surviving) companies of our vintage, but that is because we chose to grow organically.

On the Zoho suite, we have believed from the beginning that a lot of the value of collaborative productivity is integration across the products. Traditionally database oriented offerings (such as CRM) and document-centric offerings (the office suite) have existed in their separate silos. We believe the key to next generation productivity is integration across these silos.

Salesforce seems to agree, because they have partnered with Google for the Office suite part. Before that partnership, they tried to acquire us, which tells you what they would have liked to do, but we politely said no because we didn’t believe there was a cultural fit. They even tried to get us to drop our Zoho CRM, in return for a “deal” to integrate our office productivity apps with their CRM suite. It is our diversified business & product mix that allowed us the freedom to resist such unfair demands.

On the future of Zoho, explained in terms of our history. AdventNet, apart from the Zoho suite, has 40+ products, mostly focused on various aspects of systems & network management. We have tens of thousands of organizations, small & large, as customers. So Zoho will be around!

Thanks,
Sridhar