Zoho APIs Gain Traction with Vendors and Users
Increasing Adoption of Company's Open APIs Reflects Demand for Best-of-Breed Collaborative Solutions that Combine Zoho, Third-Party Applications
INTEROP LAS VEGAS - May 30, 2007 - Helping people work online, Zoho, a leading provider of Web-based applications for collaborative business, today announced increasing adoption of the Zoho APIs, a series of application programming interfaces that let anyone – from software vendors to individual customers – write programs that access and work with Zoho application data and services. The increasing adoption of the Zoho APIs reflects customer demand for creating best-of-breed collaborative solutions that combine the Zoho suite with third-party applications.
With applications vendors such as Omnidrive, Box.net, File Den, Kearen Corp., and MyDataBus.com using the Zoho APIs, Zoho is reinforcing its leadership position in the online business application space. Zoho was the first Office 2.0 vendor to open its APIs to third-parties, and the company has also been embracing APIs from other vendors, including EchoSign and Desktopize.
"At the end of the day, for a user, it is not about the application. It is about the workflow," said
Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist.
"The user's workflow can run across multiple applications from multiple vendors. To benefit the user, vendors must open up their applications. That is what we have done. Now, Zoho, along with API integration partners like Omnidrive, Box.net, and others, provides a good user workflow."
"Office 2.0 marks a new era of business collaboration for customers and vendors alike. We're not in the habit of dictating to our customers. We let them dictate to us. And they're clearly telling us they want third-party applications to have access to Zoho data and services. The Zoho APIs are our latest effort to give customers exactly what they want," added Vegesna.
Said Brian Davis at MyDataBus.com, "Zoho helps us extend our value proposition. We built our online storage service to be the easiest way to store, share, and transfer files online. With Zoho, our users get the tools they need to collaborate online. Meanwhile, providing that functionality was really a breeze. We were able to integrate Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show in days."
All About the APIs
Apart from accessing content from Zoho applications inside third-party applications, customers have also been asking for a way to use the feature-rich editors of Zoho applications within third-party apps and then push the updated content into the third-parties' servers. In response to customers' requests, Zoho APIs provide the following functionality:
The Storage API provides third-party applications access to data in Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, and Zoho Planner. Data remains in Zoho servers.
The Remote API provides third-party applications access to the editors of Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, and Zoho Planner. Data is hosted on third-party servers.
As the Zoho suite evolves, the company will open up its APIs for other Zoho applications.
Writing on the Zoho APIs, in light of the outages and security risks that Google has had with Google Notebook and Gmail, blogger Ritesh Nayak, said, "[C]ompanies like Zoho will stand out as an autonomous service which offers the same set of features without the hassles. …Online Office products should strive to be more collaborative (need of the hour) and this step only puts Zoho in a bigger league by letting people have a centralised storage and collaboration for all their documents."
A growing number of vendors are using the Zoho APIs to integrate their applications with Zoho, bringing the advantages of Zoho's online office to their users. Recent integrations include:
Box.net, a leading provider of free and premium Web-based file storage and sharing services, has integrated with Zoho Writer. Now, Box.net users can use Zoho Writer to open and edit Microsoft Word documents stored in their Box.net accounts. By using Zoho, Box.net users do not have to download the documents they want to view or modify. Edits made using Zoho are then saved to the document, which remains stored on Box.net.
"Zoho's product excellence and leadership in online editing capabilities made them an obvious a choice when looking for a way to let our members collaborate and manipulate their documents," said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net. "Box.net provides a storage platform for all sorts of media and information, and Zoho complements our service tremendously."
Kearen Corporation, a leading provider of state-of-the-art dynamic data visualization solutions, recently integrated Zoho Sheet into its Dashboard application. "With support for Zoho Sheet, Kearen users can now easily integrate data from Zoho Sheet into their dashboards along with data from other enterprise sources including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, XML and Excel workbooks," said Keith Schnable CTO of Kearen. For more information and a practical demonstration on using Zoho within Kearen, see: www.vimeo.com.
MyDataBus.com, the online file storage, sharing, and access site, has integrated with Zoho Writer. As a result, MyDataBus users can open any Zoho Writer-supported document (e.g., .DOC, ODT, RTF or HTML formats) from their MyDataBus accounts in Zoho Writer, make changes, and save it back without having to download the documents. MyDataBus.com also supports Zoho Show and Zoho Sheet, giving users online access to Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel files.
Omnidriveis working to integrate its online storage platform with the entire Zoho suite to emulate the full desktop experience on the Web. Omnidrive wants to give its users a full, Web-based document storage, management, collaboration, publishing and editing environment. To date, Omnidrive users can create, open, edit, and save documents in standard formats with Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet. Nik Cubrilovic, CEO of Omnidrive, added, "In a remarkably short period of a few months, there are already over 10,000 users utilizing Zoho via Omnidrive. This integration provides one of the fastest and most efficient ways to share multimedia files between friends and colleagues."
Anyone interested in integrating a third-party application with Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and/or Zoho Show can find links to the Zoho APIs at: writer.zoho.com.
Related Links:
Zoho APIs
writer.zoho.com
Box.net
www.box.net
File Den
www.fileden.com
Kearen Corporation
www.kearen.com
MyDataBus.com
www.mydatabus.com
-->Omnidrive
www.omnidrive.com
-->Ritesh Nayak on Impact of Zoho APIs
rnayak.wordpress.com
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About Zoho and AdventNet
Zoho is creating the most comprehensive suite of affordable, online productivity tools for today's knowledge workers. Nearly 120 developers work on the Zoho suite, often implementing new features just days after customers request them and responding to customer queries within minutes of their posting. To date, Zoho has launched 15 different applications and more are in the works. For more information on Zoho, please visit www.zoho.com.
Zoho is a division of AdventNet, in business since 1996 providing innovative software tools and serving more than 10,000 customers worldwide. For more information on AdventNet, please visit www.zohocorp.com.
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