May 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Zoho CRM aims big but hits small

TAGS: CRM

AdventNet's Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition has garnered a lot of attention thanks to its $25 per user per month sticker price -– a rate well below any other hosted application vendor. Still, the folks at Salesforce.com needn't quake in their boots just yet.

James R. Borck of the InfoWorld Test Center put Zoho CRM through its paces and found that it "falls short of enterprise requirements in a number of ways. It lacks basic audit logs essential for tracking changes to record. It's missing field format constraints that help ensure data integrity (for example, by ensuring that e-mail addresses are formatted properly, that ZIP code and phone numbers contain only digits, and so on)."

AdventNet has some work to do before Zoho CRM will qualify as an enterprise player, but "even during the course of [Borck's] evaluation, Zoho CRM benefited from a number of updates and changes. ... Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition can help small companies keep tabs on sales and service issues for a fraction of the cost of competitors. This solution is more than adequate for many SMBs."

All told, "Zoho CRM offers a surprisingly sophisticated set of features for the price, but those features don't match up with top solutions in the space, and they fall short of the needs of larger sales and service groups."

So while "folks at Salesforce.com needn't shake in their shoes just yet, they would be wise to keep an eye on fast-moving AdventNet."

Posted by Caroline Craig on May 5, 2008 07:01 AM