Business Collaboration Tournament

Yankee Group recently released a report - 'Business Collaboration Tournament: And You Thought the Madness Was Over' that matches up 16 of the top business collaboration vendors in a head-to-head contest. We are glad to see Zoho included in here along with some industry heavy weights. Its a good read. The complete article is available here (Sorry, its a PDF).

These are the 16 vendors considered for this article divided into two pools - like a Basketball game.

In the first round, Yankee matches up Zoho and Google. Here is what they have to say...

Collaboration fans could not have asked for a more exciting first round matchup. However, the misinformed fan might want to double-check where to place his or her bets. To the average fan, Google is the clear winner because a. it’s Google and b. all journalists in the space use Google Apps as their example when referring to web-based productivity suites. However, like Apple, Google is a consumer company and in a matchup against SMB-focused Zoho, Google’s business solutions do not stack up.

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Google’s Gmail (e-mail), Calendar (shared calendaring) and Talk (IM with VoIP, presence and file-sharing capabilities) are top-tier online collaboration and communications solutions. However, Zoho is SMB-focused and Google is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. IT departments have not been convinced that the service-level agreements (SLAs) Google offers with Google Apps Premier Edition are worthy of a total conversion to cloud computing. Both Google and Zoho suffer from this roadblock, among others. But for Zoho, it’s do or die; whereas for Google, it’s do or continue to make billions in online search and advertising.

The last comment above is interesting. If this sounds familiar, this is because Sridhar already talked about this.

...but in the end, Zoho’s Head Coach pushes it into the Elite Eight in a decisive victory over Google.

According to Yankee, Zoho wins over Google in the first round.

The round of Elite Eight is an interesting one with Zoho positioned against Verizon. This is an interesting comparison.

This Elite Eight thriller has some interesting mismatches on the floor between the telecommunications powerhouse Verizon Business and the agile web-based collaboration and productivity services provider Zoho.

With detailed analysis, Yankee advances Zoho to the next round.

In the end, Zoho squeaks by Verizon Business into the Final Four and continues its Cinderella run in the Yankee Group 2008 Business Collaboration Tournament due to its product road map. Without a focus on community-centric solutions, Verizon Business’ game is too communications-centric and therefore too old-school to make it to the Final Four in 2008.

This puts Zoho in final four against Microsoft, IBM & Cisco. These are some big names to be compared with. The analysis goes on to describe how Microsoft goes on to win against Zoho.

Sure, we are not the winner here nor do we expect to be so. Being considered as part of the final four is a privilege. As we always said, we understand that this is not a zero sum game. We are focused on building great affordable apps and let the market decide.

The article contains lots of other details about all 16 vendors covered. It is a good read with good analysis of the existing business collaboration market.