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Zoho Launches Status: App Transparency Done Right

Josh Catone
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Yesterday, web office application provider Zoho launched a new service: status, which tracks the health of all 24 Zoho application offerings. The status page presents a quick overview of the health of the Zoho apps in a easily digestible format, including availability and response time.

The new page loads with a summary view of the up or down status of Zoho’s apps, making it easy to tell if a problem is on your end or theirs. In addition, each application’s report can be expanded to present a small collection of useful metrics, including uptime and response time for the past week, and response time from six globally diverse locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany, and Australia.

Zoho’s status page is powered by Site24x7, and uptime monitoring service also owned by Zoho parent company AdventNet Inc. Site24x7 has news of its own yesterday, announcing the release of a new enterprise edition that offers SLA management for web application providers.

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Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna told me via email that over the past four months Zoho has been rolling out paid versions of most of its business applications and is in the midst of extending the SLA that comes with its first paid app, Zoho CRM, to cover the others. The new status page will be instrumental in keeping customers abreast of any downtime issues and making sure Zoho remains in compliance with their uptime guarantees.

“As we introduce more paid versions of our services, transparency becomes just as important as uptime and SLAs,” Vegesna said in a press release. “Our users deserve to know how Zoho is performing over time from different locations. And more enterprise organizations agree with us, which inspired us to release the Site24x7 Enterprise Account.”

The launch of Zoho Status demonstrates a level of transparency that is admirable and should be emulated by other application providers.

“This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users,” said Vegesna. We hope that other web apps follow Zoho’s lead and provide monitoring tools for customers to make it easier for them to make sure that they are getting their money’s worth. Uptime is one of the biggest concerns for the enterprise when deciding whether to migrate to web-based applications. Transparency of this sort will help ease some of those concerns among big business customers.