Some interesting comments from Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu over on Gopal Shenoy’s blog.
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.
So, its about the integration more than the collaboration & other SaaS goodness. This comes through not only in the integration within their own apps, but in the integration model they offer with third parties. I’ve had a play with their spreadsheet integration and they allow it to be run as an embedded spreadsheet within another app. Data can be loaded from and saved to the third party app with no Zoho account required. This is quite powerful, but wouldn’t be nearly so interesting if their apps weren’t online and quite good too.
Posted by Andrew 
