Zoho CRM | What It Is & How I Use It

Zoho CRM is part of the massive Zoho suite, over 55 business applications covering everything from CRM to invoicing to project management. What makes Zoho interesting from a custom development standpoint is its sheer breadth. When a client already runs their business on Zoho, building a custom web application that plugs into their existing Zoho ecosystem can save enormous amounts of time. Zoho's APIs cover CRM records, email campaigns, analytics, invoices, and more. I've built integrations that sync deal data between custom dashboards and Zoho CRM, automate invoice generation through Zoho Books, and pull analytics data into client-facing reporting tools. The platform is especially popular with small to mid-size businesses who want enterprise-level tools without the enterprise-level price tag.

The Origin Story

The company behind Zoho was originally called AdventNet, founded by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in 1996 in Chennai, India. They started as a network management software company, selling tools to IT departments. Vembu, who holds a PhD from Princeton, decided in the mid-2000s to pivot toward building a full suite of online business applications, and he wanted to build all of them in-house, not through acquisitions. That decision was considered crazy at the time, but it's exactly what they did. They rebranded to Zoho Corporation in 2009. The company has remained entirely bootstrapped and privately held, Vembu has famously never taken a single dollar of outside investment, which is almost unheard of at Zoho's scale of over 100 million users.

Why Developers Love It

Sridhar Vembu moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to a rural village in Tamil Nadu, India, in 2020, and he now runs the entire company from there. He set up Zoho's headquarters operations in the village and started a program called "Zoho Schools of Learning" that recruits young people from rural areas who couldn't afford college, trains them for two years, and hires them as full-time engineers. Many of Zoho's products have been built by graduates of this program. Vembu has been vocal about his belief that the tech industry's obsession with elite university credentials is misguided.