Zoho: Google Apps' Largest Partner -- And Competitor?

By samdizzy

Zoho

In fact, Zoho now claims to have 6 million users across its various SaaS applications — including Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice and Zoho Site24x7, just to name a few.

Zoho’s strategy is pretty simple: Each time the company develops and launches a new SaaS application, the offering has integrations to the existing Zoho SaaS suite.  “As a customer you shouldn’t have to worry about integrating cloud applications together,” says Raju Vegesna, an evangelist at Zoho.

During a meeting at Zoho Corp.’s Pleasanton, Calif., offices last week, Vegesna and his peers described how Zoho Corp. is developing its two flagship businesses:

All of the Zoho and ManageEngine applications are built in-house by Zoho Corp.’s own development teams. The company has been entirely self-financed, with no need for venture capital or outside financing, according to multiple company executives.

Zoho Target Market

Zoho’s SaaS applications typically target businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees. The goal is to deliver a a great consumer experience without all the integration headaches that customers can potentially experience when they try to string Microsoft Exchange, QuickBooks and other third-party applications together.

In some ways that means competing with Google Apps and Microsoft’s Office 365. In other ways, that means partnering and integrating closely with Google’s SaaS suite. Through the Google Apps Marketplace, Zoho is signing up roughly 1,000 new customers each week, Vegesna says. “We’re the largest Google Apps partner; we’ve got 13 integrations with them.”

Still, the Google Apps Marketplace relationship represents only about 10 percent of Zoho’s ongoing SaaS business, Vegesna added.

So where do channel partners potentially fit into the Zoho story? Vegesna points to two potential opportunities.

First, he says, check out Zoho Creator, a tool that allows partners to build their own SaaS applications for customers. Second, check in with  Zoho’s sister business, ManageEngine, which offers a range of IT management tools for MSPs (managed services providers).