Zoho Works With VMware to Deliver Private Cloud Software-as-a-Service For The Enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO & PLEASANTON, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zoho today announced a relationship with VMware designed to give customers a streamlined approach to running Zoho applications in their own data centers, leveraging the industry-leading VMware platform, which has been adopted by thousands of customers. Zoho will demonstrate the new deployment approach, which relies on VMware vSphere 4, in the VMware vCloud Pavilion at VMworld 2009 to be held August 31-September 3, 2009, at The Moscone Center in San Francisco.

"Most of our users access Zoho applications that are running in Zoho data centers," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of ZOHO Corp. "But we also do onsite deployments for larger enterprises that want to run Zoho on their premises, behind their firewalls. Previously, we offered those customers a single hardware configuration. This new relationship enables us to deliver solutions that help customers build internal SaaS clouds with Zoho applications, leveraging the VMware platforms that they are already using."

"Customers are continually looking for ways to simplify their IT environments," said Dan Chu, VP of emerging products and markets, VMware. "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 datacenter -- retaining the Web-based simplicity and efficiency benefits of Zoho's applications while keeping the applications in-house."

Expanding Enterprise Options

For enterprises that want to run Zoho online applications on-site, Zoho historically delivered its applications as appliances, via racks of servers that were exact replicas of the hardware running in Zoho data centers. The rack solution, however, forced companies to use Zoho's unique hardware configuration if they wanted to run Zoho on-site. The VMware platform will minimize the hardware limitations of the Zoho rack, while increasing the availability, resilience and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure. Customers who want their Zoho applications to execute locally will have the choice of running Zoho applications on their internal cloud based on VMware vSphere 4, which runs on a broad range of hardware and is widely deployed in enterprises today.The VMware relationship will give enterprises an improved approach for running Zoho on-site as an internal cloud and keeping their data behind the firewall, which has been a concern of customers. Zoho applications can also be integrated with a company's existing applications. Users get the best of both worlds -- data stays in-house, and cloud applications are deployed with complete control.