adventnet

Zoho's winning strategy: open source + cloud

These days, it's virtually impossible to avoid open-source software. If you're a Web company, don't even bother trying.

That's the message I got from a conversation Friday with Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho, a leading competitor to Google Docs. According to Vegesna, the company--formerly known as AdventNet, now called Zoho Corp.--has been around for 13 years, and has always used free, but not necessarily open-source, software as part of its strategy. The company has released software under open-source licenses before, including the somewhat controversial vTiger project.

With 1.8 million users of Zoho.com, growing … Read more

Zoho to Salesforce: Let us onto Force.com

After Tuesday, Barack Obama and John McCain will (presumably) bury the hatchet and move on with their lives. I'm not quite sure I can say the same thing about the respective heads of Zoho and Salesforce.com.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, the company behind the Zoho suite of online applications, has again called out Marc Benioff in a public post accusing Salesforce of attempting to "block customers from migrating to Zoho CRM."

Earlier this year, Vembu publicized details of negotiations he had with Salesforce in a bid to make Zoho work with AppExchange, an online marketplace … Read more