Stories of broken relationships often end with bitterness and reprisals. Zoho, which offers a wide range of software-as-a-service applications, said it had been wooed by Salesforce.com, but rejected its advances. With that relationship dead, Zoho is now taking on the CRM giant mano a mano.
Over the past few months, Zoho has aggressively been rolling out new pieces of its business applications set, such as invoicing, project management and HR functions. Its release of the Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is designed to make it “easier for medium to large organizations to implement Zoho CRM.”
The company isn’t shy about its goal: to steal away customers from Salesforce.com, which Zoho says it is doing successfully, with one or two customers leaving Salesforce.com for Zoho daily.
Raju Veges, Zoho’s evangelist, told us that he’s seeing firsthand evidence of the migration away from Salesforce.com. “Regarding the migrations from Salesforce, these are the requests coming to us from their users, and in some instances, they are taking help from our support team to migrate their data from Salesforce to Zoho CRM.”
Apparently, those customers like what they’re finding. “Many users who migrated from Salesforce are happy to find similar, functionally rich applications at one-fifth the price. That’s the common reaction we are getting,” Veges said. Zoho claims to have more than 800,000 users.
History Together
Zoho was invited several months ago by Salesforce.com to participate in AppExchange, which would allow Zoho applications to run on the Force.com platform. “We integrated into AppExchange. We were about a week from the release, and [Salesforce.com] asked us not to integrate into their platform, as we compete with them with Zoho CRM,” Veges told us. According to Zoho, Salesforce.com knew about Zoho CRM before the company was asked to participate in AppExchange.
Salesforce.com then offered to purchase Zoho outright. According to a…