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Zoho's Vegesna Underscores the Irony of Collaboration Tools That Don't Collaborate

July 29, 2020

By Tracey E. Schelmetic - Virtual PBX Contributor

Collaboration tools for business processes and communication are everywhere today. The biggest irony about them, according to Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna, is that the collaboration tools often don’t collaborate themselves.


“Each vendor sells its own nicely branded silo,” posted Vegesna. “This approach to collaboration is deeply flawed…Customers are rightly questioning the counter-productive nature of siloed collaboration tools that are being duct-taped at the top.”

Business software company Zoho says it sees evidence that users are moving away from using siloed tools, and that as a result, the company is seeing unprecedented adoption from customers replacing Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and G Suite. A study by Beagle Research agreed, finding that 67.2 percent of respondents across North America felt that their work is chaotic due to non-integrated systems.

"Just like collaboration happens in the context of a business, collaboration tools should show up in the context of business apps,” said Vegesna. “You simply cannot separate the two which is why we started building Zoho apps 15 years ago with this philosophy.”

Zoho Workplace was designed to fill the gap as competitors such as Zoom, Dropbox, and Slack fail to provide a seamless experience from start to finish, said Vegesna. The suite provides a unified platform including email, chat, audio and video conferencing, shared file storage, and online office suite that enhance the productivity of employees, anywhere. It is an online workspace that allows users to securely work together, meet, collaborate and accomplish goals in a contextual setting. The solution enables single sign-on across these applications where work streams follow users as they move from screen to screen.

The solution is made up of the following components:

  •         Zoho Mail, secure business email with calendar, tasks, notes and bookmarks.
  •         Zoho Cliq: Secure instant messaging with audio and video call capabilities.
  •         Zoho Meeting: Online meeting and conferencing application. Zoho Meeting has seen a 772 percent increase in meeting sessions since March.
  •         Zoho ShowTime: Online training and virtual classroom solution. Usage has increased 1,100 percent since March, according to the company.
  •         Zoho Connect: Intranet for organization and organization specific social-media platform for employees.
  •         Zoho Office Suite: Online office suite with enhanced co-creating, reviewing and collaboration features. Suite includes Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show.
  •         Zoho WorkDrive: Cloud storage for the entire organization with ability to share files securely. 



Edited by Maurice Nagle

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