Zoho goes SMB 2.0

Zoho's Chief Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, in a brief interview to CloudAve shared his vision of Zoho strategy and the nearest plans of this SaaS provider. Of course, the most interesting is how Raju sees Zoho in future on the market where it competes with Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. In his opinion, Zoho will remain an independent company and will become the leading provider for small business. He even suggeted the term SMB 2.0 (opposed to Enterprise 2.0). The clear positioning Zoho on small business will enable them to compete with IT giants, that are primarily targeting large clients. After all, affordable price, suitable functionality and positive feedback from other users matter more for small business than the big vendor name. That's why Zoho, instead of spending millions on advertising, sales army and partner network, invests all the resources to the software development.

Zoho has pretty big plans for the SMB market. Zoho is going not only provide each business with all the necessary (integrated) apps, but also connect small businesses into the network. They plan to not only enable companies to integrate their virtual offices and support joint projects and outsourcing, but also create a social network where entrepreneurs can find employees, partners and customers.

As for the nearest Zoho plans, Raju promised that soon Zoho People will become a full-featured internal social network. In addition, we can expect online accounting service  based on Zoho Invoice. At the same time, Raju said that Zoho has no plans to develop social tools to link the virtual office with external social networks, and even Raji called Social CRM a bubble that will soon burst. On the other hand, it's very likely that Zoho will offer integration with the new Microsoft cloud offerings: Windows Azure and Office Web Apps.

See also: Top 10 Office suites