Sesiri Pathirane

Forests are home to 300 million people and over 50% of earth’s plant and animal species. But the forest cover is disappearing at an alarming rate.

We have lost almost half – almost 3 billion hectares – of the forests that once blanketed the earth. Every year at least 16 million additional hectares fall to the axe, torch, bulldozer, and chain saw.

5 million hectares of forests cover vanishes every year just to meet our everyday need for paper. A need we fulfill in a very careless and wasteful manner.

So can we meet this basic need and yet take the responsibility of saving the forest? One of the answer is Minus One, a one step, easy-to-do initiative to save our forests.

By doing something as simple as reducing the font size of a document by 1 before printing, we can reduce the paper consumption for printouts considerably, almost up to 50%.

And that means lesser number of trees need to go under the axe. Just few seconds of effort will add years to forests.

Do your bit. Reduce the font size by 1. Save paper. Help the forests.

It was sometime back in 2002 I was referred to Hostdime by a friend of mine and back then I wanted somewhere cheap to host my ‘business idea‘ (It had a different brand name back then) I had. Hostdime was cheap comparing to the others we found and so went ahead with them. Around 2o03, I was going schooling at Southern Arkansas University and I still had the basic hosting account. I remember I used to dial the FL local number they had and Manny Vivar (founder and the current VP of global operations) used to answer the pone in the middle of the night.

Around 2004 while having the hostdime account I did try out some of the other companies like Godaddy, 1&1 and Aplus.net, etc where I ran in to disasters with. I had dedicated servers with Godaddy at one time and it became a nightmare. I could not get them to do anything unless I pay their ‘extra charges’ they had coming up with. The servers did not boot and they still would not do anything about it; sure enough they wanted me to get their ‘manages servers‘ priced probably three times of unmanaged back then. With 1&1, I ended up talking to customer services they in Philippines and was kept on hold for hours and hours. Aplus.net probably had one of the worse customer services as well.

All these times I always had Hostdime accounts and it very surprisingly they had been changing their systems, adding employees, improving customer support every day and night. Around 2007 I looked back of everything they had done and I really was surprised! A lot of hosting companies have both managed and unmanaged hosting models and I started to think what the difference is. With hostdime, I felt like everything was managed, customer support was very impressive and it still is. They were all about serving clients than making another sale.

I surely learnt a lot all the years just by looking at what changes Manny has made to Hostdime. He has certainly made Hostdime the Zappos of hosting in this decade. We too resell a lot of their hosting services to our clients and they have been a great partner in our business processes.

If Manny writes a book on Business Development, I would buy it in a heart beat!

PS: By the way, do not believe what some of these hosting reviews sites will tell you.

There were a number of discussions went in back and forth on really getting in to the information that matters through your social streams and we came up with a great product called ‘Hubover.’ Hubover lets you bookmark URLs that matters to you in both private and public. Public ‘Hub Entrees’ can be followed by your network.

I just got this forward from a friend of mine and just could not erase it without sharing it! It lists Al-Qaeda Vs LTTE side by side.

Download Here

‘We support any nation that is FOR humanity and AGAINST terrorism!’

Jason’s podcast episode with Gary Vaynerchuck inspired me to rethink a lot of things tonight and a few minutes later, I get this email from Salesforce. I don’t mean to be rude, but I just listed my comments in front of her email.

-Start Mail

Hi Sesiri,

Thank you for the update and explaining where you are in the evaluation process with Zoho and Salesforce. I understand that it seems as though you have chosen Zoho based on the costs difference. I did want to be sure to send you this email which I have developed five reasons to choose salesforce.com over Zoho CRM. This information serves only to ensure that you are 100 percent confident in choosing your CRM applicaiton. Please let me know if it makes sense to discuss further, otherwise I will close your file.

I personally don’t believe in such a thing called ‘Closing a file..’ If that is the case, most likely, it would be your loss; lot of other people have been successful WITHOUT SF I guess.

If you have any questions, please contact me at your convenience.

Best regards,

Mxxxx Mcxxxxxx
(415) xxx-xxxx

1. Market Leadership
With more than 25 releases of our application, Salesforce is the most functionally rich on-demand application in the world. Salesforce.com continues to receive considerable recognition for our CRM vision, including:

- Winner, Small Business Suite CRM — CRM Magazine 2007, 2009
- Winner, Sales Force Automation — CRM Magazine 2007, 2008, 2009
- Gold Award, “Products of the Year” –  SearchCRM.com 2008
- Editors’ Choice Award — PC Magazine 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007
- Innovation Award, Salesforce CRM Call Center & Customer Portal — TMC Labs 2008
- Technology of the Year — InfoWorld 2004, 2005, 2006
- CRM Excellence Award — Customer Interaction Solutions 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
- Top 100 Innovators Award — BusinessWeek 2006
- Best CRM Solution Award — CODIE 2002 to 2009

It is great that you have reached all these achievements; that is one of the reasons I had narrowed you down to last 3 or 5.

2. Commitment to CRM Success

Salesforce.com is the market leader in on-demand CRM, and our subscription-based pricing forces us to create more innovative programs to foster customer success. According to salesforce.com customer surveys, 94% of current customers would recommend our on-demand service to a colleague.

Zoho CRM is one of many applications offered by Zoho. Zoho’s parent company AdventNet, a provider of software development services, has also has invested in another CRM offering. How much innovation and focus on CRM success can be expected from such a diverse company with limited resources?

I think it is VERY unfair for you to make this statement. They have been a great business for years now. What is wrong with investing in another product? There are many businesses out there who have done it. May be that is what some of these major players should try to do too.

3. Search Engine Marketing

Salesforce for Google AdWords helps businesses grow by generating new leads and turning those leads into new customers. This allows companies to manage their search engine marketing campaigns and measure their impact on revenue at a keyword level directly from Salesforce.

This does not impress me. Google Adwords is just one and plays a very limited effect in my business.

Zoho CRM does not offer search engine marketing integration, leaving customers with limited visibility into the effectiveness of their search marketing programs.

4. Best of Breed Email Integration

Salesforce.com offers complete Microsoft Outlook integration at no additional charge. Outlook users can add incoming or outgoing emails to the appropriate record in Salesforce with a single click, and synchronize contacts and calendars with Salesforce automatically. Integration with Apple Mail, Entourage, Gmail, Google Calendar are also available with Salesforce.  Salesforce.com also allows customers to track when an email sent from the application is opened and how many times it’s read, providing immediate feedback into the impact of your messages.

Zoho CRM offers limited Outlook integration at an additional charge, but lacks the ability to create contacts from emails, link emails to opportunities, or schedule automatic calendar synchronization.  Zoho CRM forces customers to use its Zoho Mail product at an additional cost in order to integrate to more popular email applications like Gmail.  Finally, Zoho CRM does not offer the ability to track when email messages are read, leaving users wondering if their emails are received at all.

Considering the price, I think Zoho still beats in several hundreds, or may be more than a grand.

5. Document Management and Integration

Salesforce increases productivity by providing access to essential documents and content directly from the application, including Google Docs. Comprehensive Microsoft Office integration populates Word mail merge templates and Excel reports with data directly from Salesforce.

Zoho CRM does not offer a central repository for vital documents directly in the application. Further, Zoho CRM cannot generate a mail merge document into its own Zoho Writer product.

Technology-wise, Salesforce is light years ahead of its competitors. Beyond that, we offer a community of shared success to help you get ahead — and stay there. Check it out here: http://www.salesforce.com/community/

Please let me know if you have any questions. I’m happy to help out in any way I can.

How about a free working demo for 30 days? Or may be a light-version of  the application instead of being forced to pay over a grand at the very first step..

-End Mail

I truly, honestly, do not mean to be harsh, but this had to be said! I am sorry if I disappointed anyone.

Update: 4/23/2011

Though I did not mean to get any attention for this post from Zoho, they have anyway went ahead and published a great blog post about explaining their view point to SF’s email. Thank you Sridhar and Team for making things even clearer. SF very harshly talked about Sridhar funding Vtiger. Then I was thinking to myself, why on earth would Marc Benioff offered to buy-out Zoho back in 2007 or 2008? Here’s a better post from Sridhar himself.