PaaS

On Monday I was shown a demo by Harsh Avardhan of the new Zoho Creator 3.0.

Funnily enough Zoho have created their own cartoon to explain Zoho Creator which is very similar to what Google did for Chrome. Seemingly I was the first person to see it :) 

I’m only surprised that there are no posts about the announcement on the Zoho Blog yet.

For those of you unfamiliar with Zoho Creator it allows you to create Database Driven applications easily and cost-effectively without the need for expensive servers. The applications reside in the Zoho “cloud”.

There are two free packages for Personal and Business users allowing 5 applications and 200mb of free storage. After that price plans increase varying with nunber of applications that can be created and storage space.

Among the highlights of Harsha’ presentation for me were:

• The marketplace where developers/companies who have created apps can supply their work similar to AppExchange
• A new facility to post requests for applications that are delivered to all the Zoho Creator Developer community. This is a classic problem in software development, reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again….
• There is increased ability to use HTML when designing forms

It’s obvous that Zoho are targetting applications for every concievable business sector and function being developed on the platform and not just 1 degree of seperation from CRM type systems.

We’re investigating migrating a number of applications to Zoho Creator which could prove very interesting.

A Zoho Creator demo shows a screencast of how the system works