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TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
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Zoho offers reporting in the cloud
Helena Schwenk
Zoho offers reporting in the cloud
Last month Zoho announced the production release of Zoho Reports, its online reporting and business intelligence (BI) application. Zoho Reports is a cloud offering providing users with a basic yet functional set of BI reporting capabilities that allows them to upload data and build reports, and collaborate and share them online. This announcement marks a small step in the development of BI reporting in the cloud, but represents a larger step in Zoho's battle with titans Google and Microsoft to achieve dominance in the online office application space.
Zoho offers a simplistic collaborative reporting option at a low cost
The advantages of a cloud-based deployment model such as Zoho Reports are well documented. However, the benefits of no upfront costs and no hardware and software to maintain cannot be underestimated, especially for cost-conscious small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or even consumers. Zoho Reports represents the company's attempt to replicate some of the success it has had with its low-cost personal productivity tools and business applications, except this time in the BI reporting space. Designed using a spreadsheet interface, Zoho Reports is squarely aimed at Excel users who require basic reporting and charting capabilities but also need the capability to publish and share their reports with peers and other users. While Zoho Reports comes with all the core functionality you'd expect from a reporting tool - drag-and-drop report creation, querying, drill-down and filtering - the ability to share reports via the cloud (using a web browser) without having to invest in specialist software is likely to appeal to the resource-constrained IT departments of SMEs. This overcomes one of the common problems with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which are designed for single, personal use, where users often resort to emailing copies to one another, inevitably causing versioning problems. Moreover, because there is no formalised audit trail to track changes made to data in the spreadsheet, the lineage of the numbers is often lost. While Microsoft Excel Services - based on SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) - overcomes these problems to a large extent, it obviously requires an investment and commitment in the SPS platform. Zoho Reports, on the other hand, offers a potentially lower-cost option without that extra baggage. The company offers attractive, low-cost, flexible pricing schemes as well. There is access to a free edition, then pricing starts from $15 per month (for 250,000 rows and two users) up to $95 per month for the professional edition (for 2 million rows and 20 users).Zoho has to prove its data security credentials
Zoho has a responsibility as the host provider to prove its data access and security credentials if it wants to further the adoption of reports. It supports this by providing access to data and reports via user names and passwords, and allowing permissions such as read-only or read-write to be controlled while report sharing. The company also adopts industry appropriate data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures to protect against unauthorised access and alteration of a company's or individual's data. Ultimately though, success will depend on how confident users feel about uploading and saving reports online. Zoho attempts to take on the titans
Zoho Reports will provide more competition in the price-sensitive SME BI marketplace, where the large players such as SAP Crystal Reports with Crystal Report on demand and IBM's Cognos Express compete with independent, open source and SaaS players such as QlikTech, Jaspersoft and Oco. However, its release is potentially designed to introduce a BI flavour to Zoho's expanding suite of online office productivity and business applications. The company has been very aggressive in this space, launching over 20 different applications - from CRM to Mail, Projects, Invoice and Wiki in the last few years - and has reached over 2 million users. However, the big challenge for Zoho is to take on the giants in the online application and office productivity space, most notably Google and its Apps offering, Microsoft with its web-based version of Microsoft 2010, and Adobe Buzzword. As a small, privately owned company, Zoho has an uphill task on its hands as it attempts to beat the resources, budgets and market clout of these big players, but the release of Reports does help to add more competitive strings to its bow.
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