This is a guest post by Irwin Lazar, the President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy.
About Metrigy: Metrigy is an innovative research firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC), digital workplace, digital transformation, and Customer Experience (CX)/contact center—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations.
What’s the news?
Zoho has announced Trident, its new unified communications application designed to create a single hub for multi-channel employee engagement. Trident unifies employee access to email, calendar, chat, phone calls, meetings, tasks, and associated apps into a single web or desktop app and will be available as part of Zoho’s Workplace Suite. Zoho also announced further integration of its phone system capabilities into its Cliq team collaboration and Zoho Meetings apps, allowing users to place and receive phone calls and texts across any app. In addition, Zoho announced an expansion of its Workplace features to include a new webinar app, grammar tool, mobile device management (MDM), and enhanced file synchronization. Workplace Suite starts at $3 per user monthly, with additional costs for mail and phone.
What do our metrics say?
Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 global research study found that almost 53% of the 440 participating organizations now consider team collaboration apps like Trident to be a work hub. Among our success group, defined as those with above mean return on or productivity associated with their collaboration investments, a whopping 66.7% view team apps as a hub for work.
What’s Metrigy’s take?
Zoho continues to expand its Workplace capabilities as it grows its presence across a number of employee and customer engagement app segments. With the addition of Trident to Workplace, Zoho delivers the benefits of a work hub that integrates all communications, regardless of channel, into a single app. This approach saves time and complexity by eliminating switching between separate email and chat apps.
Converging email and messaging apps sets the stage for integration of other capabilities, including calling and meetings as well as workflow and task management features, providing a truly unified interface for engagement. Zoho’s additional features provide additional value for its Workplace offering that competes with the likes of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 at a considerably lower cost. At present time Google lacks a dedicated desktop app for mail and messaging. Microsoft has announced Teams chat integration into Microsoft Outlook for delivery later this year.
What does Metrigy recommend?
Companies seeking to simplify communications and collaboration through feature integration would be wise to evaluate Zoho’s latest additions. Existing Zoho customers should consider implementing Trident as a means to integrate voice, email, chat, and meetings into a single UI to improve user experience.
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