Another Score for Small Business CRM: Zoho Reports Moves out of Beta

Today, Zoho announced the production release of Zoho Reports, their online reporting and business intelligence tool. Zoho CRM products are wholly web-based, and Zoho Reports emerges with a new pricing model and features after two years in beta. It was formerly known as Zoho DB, and it facilitates data analysis for database administrators and developers.

The new functionalities found in the Zoho Reports’ commercial release are new dashboards and an iGoogle gadget; pricing plans for the new release begin at $15 per month (250,000 rows and 2 users). With the dashboard view, users can collate similar reports and view them all on a single page. The iGoogle gadget, meanwhile, allows users to embed the gadget version of Zoho Reports on their iGoogle homepage, giving them greater access to important data.

A free edition of Zoho Reports will be offered in addition, and features intrinsic to both versions include the ability to upload from a variety of data sources, including Excel and HTML files, and support for both on-demand and on-premise business suites and databases. Zoho Reports also offers a drag-and-drop interface, and collaborative tools through which users can work together on reports. Zoho is also promising secure data.

As a small business CRM vendor, Zoho competes with Google Apps and the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010, so they’ve implemented a less traditional business model: continually launching new products and offerings to their existing products. It’s certainly paid off—they currently have over 2 million users—and it will be interesting to see how Zoho, as the lesser-known brand, remains competitive during the next year.

Tags: , ,

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.