Zoho unveils UC platform Trident with new collaboration technology

Zoho Corporation has unveiled its unified communications platform, Trident. It is Zoho's first desktop native application that brings collaboration, productivity and communication experience in one place.

Trident is a move away from individual product experiences as Zoho works to provide its customers with a unified platform. The company also launched strengthened collaboration technologies to offer businesses easier ways to communicate across channels, reduce tool-ambiguity, and improve an organisation's overall digital adoption. Establishing itself as a central work hub or virtual headquarters, Zoho Workplace is a unified office platform that is a flexible, full-featured business mail and cloud office suite. It is built on a common data model and is unified through search and AI, enabling users to operate collaboratively and seamlessly through applications.

"In the past year, Zoho Workplace adoption has accelerated as businesses of all sizes transition to digital-forward, hybrid work. With a clear focus on continued innovation, Zoho is wellpositioned to thrive during this time of readjustment," said Rakeeb Rafeeque, Product Strategy Lead, Zoho Workplace. "The goal of Zoho Workplace is to enable businesses to unify their work to a point where the line between apps disappears. It's heartening to see so many new businesses join the Zoho family, using Zoho Workplace as their customisable centre of gravity."

 Zoho Workplace now serves more than 16 million users worldwide. In India, Zoho Workplace grew 33% year-over-year, in 2022. Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi are driving growth in the region. Additionally, the leading verticals are IT, Retail, Finance, Manufacturing & Real estate. The unified office suite also saw increasing adoption from Tier 2/ 3 towns, including Ernakulam and Rajkot, showcasing the increasing demand of a collaboration solution across the nation. The growth is attributed to increasing business demand for simplified, streamlined solutions that maintain utmost standards for user privacy and also rising costs from other collaboration platform providers. Globally, migrations from Google, Microsoft and GoDaddy to Zoho Workplace almost doubled in 2022. In India, the highest number of migrations were from Google.

Zoho Workplace's new updates enable organisations to navigate the dynamic hybrid work needs while operating in a challenging economic landscape. These new applications and updates were built on three critical business needs of the hour –

First, reimagining traditional product boundaries with a focus on employee experience. This led to the launch of Zoho Trident. The unified platform 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). This allows employees to make direct line calls, send SMSes, and pick up inbound calls across the apps. Given that communication with the workforce is vital, 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 sharing screen (saves bandwidth consumption) and upload session material prior to the webinar to be shared with the attendees during the session.

Second, to create productivity elevators for employees to make everyday work more efficient, this new update includes two additions. The new AI-based grammar tool, BluePencil, gives writing suggestions and a text editor that can be used on any third-party webpage. The Universal Drag-and-Drop functionality saves time doing things across multiple workplace products. For example, users will be able to drag an email attachment and drop in to their colleague's chat box. TrueSync has been added to Zoho Workdrive so that hard drive storage limits are no longer a concern.

Third, as the digital workspace expands and evolves, so will the threat vectors. Therefore to double down on security to reduce misuse of data—intentionally and unintentionally—Mobile Device Management capabilities and OTP-restricted emails have been added to the workplace suite. "Zoho Webinar, Trident and Phone Systems are great additions and enhancements for existing customers of Zoho Workplace," said Mrinal Rai, Principal Analyst and Senior Manager, ISG.

Zoho Workplace Pricing

Zoho Workplace is available in three editions: Standard is ₹99 per user per month. Professional is ₹399 per user per month. Zoho Mail is ₹58.34 per user per month.