Zoho teams with VMWare for private cloud SaaS delivery

Zoho [1], an online provider of a suite of business software, announced this week they have established a relationship with virtualization vendor VMWare [2] to deliver Zoho behind the firewall. This move effectively gives customers the option of a private cloud, in which to deliver Zoho's business software.

Prior to this agreement, says Raju Vegesn, who is a product evangelist for Zoho, it required expensive hardware, especially for larger implementations. "Zoho offers on-site deployment option for Enterprises with over 10K employees," he explained. "Such a deployment generally requires Zoho-recommended hardware (typically racks of servers, based on the apps deployed). With today's announcement, we will be able to deploy our apps on any hardware that runs VMWare, ultimately giving the hardware option to the enterprises." This will likely mean a less costly implementation requiring less hardware because of the virtualization that VMWare provides.

Vegesn says this gives enterprise customers another delivery option, one which is especially important for those concerned with keeping data securely behind the firewall. "There are several reasons some enterprises shy away from cloud apps," he says. "These enterprises want to have control of the data and with on-site deployment, the data resides behind their firewall giving them the ultimate control."

He adds that another reason enterprises shy away from cloud apps is that it's often difficult to integrate them with other enterprise applications. "With the app and data behind their firewall, they'll now be able to integrate these cloud apps with other enterprise systems they already have in place."

Dan Chu, VP of emerging products markets at VMWare agrees. "For customers that wish to run their Zoho applications on-premise, VMWare vSphere 4 provides the foundation for delivering these applications as a private cloud service inside their own firewall and data center--retaining the web-based simplicity and efficiency benefits of Zoho’s applications while keeping the applications in-house," Chu says.

It gives enterprise users who might be interested in a low-cost, but full-featured business suite alternative, to have this kind of software safely behind the firewall giving these organizations the best of both worlds.

For more information:
- see the Zoho press release [3]