2010 Was the Year of Integration for Zoho

Zoho's Raju Vegesna wrote a post looking back at Zoho CRM in 2010, emphasizing all the new integrations Zoho has rolled out this year. According to apost on Twitter, Zoho released a new CRM integration every six weeks. Meanwhile, the company released several integrations between its own products, such as Zoho Wiki and Zoho Projects. This was clearly the year of integrations for Zoho.

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Here are the Zoho CRM integrations released this year:

• Integration with Google Apps and is part of Google Apps Marketplace
• Integration with Google Docs
• Integration with Gmail through Gmail Contextual Gadgets
• Integration with QuickBooks
• Integration with Telephone Systems
• Integration with Google Sites
• Integration with Creator
• Integration with Zoho Chat

And here's a list of this year's integrations between Zoho apps:

• Zoho Wiki Integration with Zoho Projects
• Zoho Chat integration with Zoho Projects & CRM
• Zoho Creator integration with Zoho CRM & Invoice?????????????????????????????????????
• Zoho Reports integration with Zoho Creator
• Tasks Integration with Projects & CRM
• Zoho Search
• Zoho Mail & Zoho CRM

There's a tension in enterprise software between the suite/Swiss Army knife approach and the best-of-breed approach. Zoho seems to be trying to have it both ways. It offers both a mammoth suite of business applications to customers such as GE. But it also offers its applications ala cart through channels such as Google Apps Marketplace, where ZohoCRM is the third most popular application. These integrations may attract customers that use one of Zoho's best-of-breed solutions for other platforms to its larger suite of integrated offerings.

Some vendors, such as Jive and Salesforce.com are making a transition into becoming platform companies. Zoho has had an app store since 2008, selling apps built with its Zoho Creator tool. It also has an API. So to some extent, it's in the platform business too.

It will be interesting to see where Zoho goes in 2011. Will it focus on improving a few strong apps, keep expanding its suite or focus on its platform? Or will it keep juggling all three activities?

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