The News: Zoho Workplace this week unveiled Trident, a UC-focused desktop app designed to bring collaboration, productivity, and communication experience into one place, designed and optimized to cater to the needs of the modern-day hybrid and remote workforce. Read more from the Zoho blog.
Zoho Workplace Unveils Trident, a UC-focused Desktop App, Along With Updates to its Workplace Suite
Analyst Take: I viewed Zoho Workplace’s launch of Trident this week as indicative of the Zoho team’s commitment to continuous innovation. Even more impressive is that Zoho rolled out myriad updates to its Workplace suite without raising prices, which is a significant value prop in challenging economic times.
Trident is a new app designed to be a central communications and organizational hub providing access to email, instant messaging, phone, and video calls, as well as serving up the ability for users to perform task management and calendaring. This type of solution is becoming an industry-wide trend: comms and workplace hubs that entice users to stay within the platform ecosystem is rapidly becoming the norm from a vendor standpoint, so it’s no surprise to see Zoho’s move on this front.
Zoho has developed and is marketing Trident for Zoho Workplace as a unified communications platform that enables an easy shift from multiple, individual products to one platform where users can do it all. Designed to be flexible, Trident offers full-featured business mail, chat, and a cloud native office suite.
I believe that Zoho is somewhat targeting the enterprise market with the Zoho Trident solution which, from a revenue standpoint, makes sense and is in line with the moves we’ve seen Zoho make toward serving the enterprise customer. That said, Zoho Trident and the Zoho Workplace suite nicely serve organizations of all sizes.
Other Enhancements from Zoho Workplace
It’s worth noting here that Zoho shared that Zoho Workplace has experienced 30% growth YoY and boasts some 16 million users. Streamlined solutions that mitigate the gap between work and the apps needed to do that work and which are also affordable are incredibly attractive today.
Zoho Workplace is designed to be a central work hub, a cloud office suite, and provide a virtual work headquarters for customers. Built on a common data model and unified through search and AI, the platform enables users to collaborate efficiently and effectively without popping out to do other tasks like chat, email, etc. In addition to Trident, here are some of the other enhancements Zoho has made to its Zoho Workplace offering:
Communication: As mentioned, Zoho Workplace’s Trident features a unified office platform that combines mail, messages, audio/video calls, calendar, and tasks in one place.
Additionally, the Zoho Voice platform is now a full Phone System integrated directly within Zoho Cliq (team collaboration), and Zoho Meeting (web conferencing). Users are able to make and receive direct line calls, send SMS messages, and pick up inbound calls across the apps.
Zoho Webinar: Zoho Webinar, is now available within the Zoho Meeting app. Users can host and engage with thousands of attendees using virtual file sharing instead of screen sharing, offering considerable bandwidth savings, and can upload session material prior to the webinar to be shared with the attendees during the session.
Productivity: For the grammarians among us, Zoho Workplace also introduced BluePencil, a new AI-based grammar tool, which provides users with writing suggestions and a text editor that can be used on any third-party webpage. As someone who does a lot of editing, I could not be more excited about this. In addition, users will be able to save time working across multiple workplace products using a handy Universal Drag-and-Drop functionality. For example, users will be able to quickly and easily drag an email attachment and drop into a colleague’s chat box.
TrueSync is another attractive upgrade to Zoho WorkDrive. TrueSync eliminates concerns about storage limits and provides quick and easy access to folders and files on the desktop by mirroring all WorkDrive files, enabling users to switch between their devices and the cloud for file access.
Security: These days, security is a topmost concern for organizations of all sizes. Zoho has added Mobile Device Management capabilities and OTP-restricted emails to the Zoho Workplace suite leveraging ManageEngine’s applications to enhance security. The application allows administrators to set up, supervise, and secure enterprise mobile devices and apps, and also restricts what users can download to their phones. This will make our friends in IT very happy.
Looking Ahead for Zoho Workplace
Wrapping up, these are solid enhancements from Zoho for its Zoho’s Workplace offering, and the inclusion of Trident should be well-received. That said, Zoho has some serious competition in the collaboration and workplace platform market. Zoom, Webex, Microsoft and others are all working to do the same thing: get users to their platforms and give them every reason never to leave. The compelling part of Zoho’s value proposition, other than the fact that the company has an excellent reputation in the market and a track record of providing good customer experiences, is the pricing. Adding functionality without raising prices is very attractive in today’s challenging macroeconomic times when every organization across the globe is endeavoring to do more with less. That, and the fact that Zoho’s pricing is less than that of some other offerings should ensure it makes it to the top of consideration lists as organizations make decisions about workplace collaboration and comms platforms.
Speaking of pricing, Zoho’s most expensive “Professional” service plan costs $6 per user per month, and includes every feature on the platform, 100GB of mail storage, and the same amount of shared drive space. Fees for the 10GB tier, with fewer features, drop to $3 per monthly user, and there’s a mail-only tier available for $1 per monthly user.
Zoho’s new Trident product is available now in public beta. Zoho currently offers Windows and MacOS versions of the client application, and mobile apps are currently in development.
For organizations, enterprise or otherwise, looking to consolidate the mix of vendors in their current tech stacks into a single platform, these updates to Zoho Workplace and the addition of Trident, combined with a compelling price point should attract attention.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: SiliconIndia
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
