Stories about: Zoho

There are many popular, low-cost ways to toss text onto the Web, from blogs and Google Docs to social networking sites. Likewise, you can find a lot of sites where you can post photos and videos. But until recently, less attention has been paid to online databases -- and that's a pity, because lots of people besides database geeks would benefit from a bit more structure to their data.

When it comes to running a business, our feet are firmly on the ground but our data and software are increasingly in the cloud. My burgeoning media empire consists of two people (my lovely wife and me), but to the outside world we seem a lot bigger, thanks to online applications. To get our tasks done, we lean heavily on Web-based apps, from office suites to calendars to collaboration tools that let us work with colleagues on the other coast. Better yet, many of the services we use are free--at least, in their most basic incarnations. That never hurts.

AdventNet's Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a new, low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering that may be impossible to ignore. Building on a Professional edition that combines sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules, Zoho Enterprise aims to meet the needs of corporate customers with such features as organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

Worried by the small but growing number of small businesses and consumers switching from Microsoft Office to cheaper or free online alternatives such as Google Apps, Microsoft plans to arm a key cohort of its formidable legion of partners to help fight the threat to Office 2.0.

Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour," says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition.

Mozilla unveiled the final beta of Firefox 3.0 Wednesday and will move on to the release candidate stage by freezing changes as early as next week.

If there's one thing the digital revolution has taught us, it's that we shouldn't get too attached to anything. Technology has a way of seizing long-held ideas and entrenched industries and turning them upside-down.

Two years ago, when Google took its first steps in the office productivity market, the move generated much buzz, mostly because it was seen as another competitive clash with Microsoft.

If there's any suspicion that cloud computing is just about building "best of breed" stand-alone application silos on the Web, the recent move by ZoHo may show that cloud computing is finally moving to a more integrated approach.

Mostly lost among the flock of announcements at Microsoft's Mix08 Web developer conference last week was the news that Redmond is starting to test a Web database service based on its popular SQL Server database management software.