Solo Technology

Exactly 24 hours after I handed the Google Apps folks my credit card, Zoho has announced Zoho Business.

What is Zoho Business? A competitor of Google Apps! From the announcement:

Zoho Business is the new category we are launching today for businesses. With Zoho Business we bring multiple Zoho applications under a single roof and provide an administration console to manage users, domains, groups etc. We have said several times that we wanted to be the IT Department for SMBs and this is our first step towards that.

Tentative pricing is about $10/person cheaper than Google’s Enterprise offering ($40 vs. $50).

Here’s a bit more on features from an announcement I received from Arvind:

• Company level Admin Console
• Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
• Centralized User and Group Management
• Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
• Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
• Customization Options
• Multiple levels of Security including SSL
• Remote Backup
• Telephone Support and more.

Remote backup? I might look into that soon.

The big unknowns for me? With Google Apps, all the folks at the office pretty much already know how to work with GMail and Google Calendar, the learning curve will be pretty minimal. Also, we’ll have Google’s (usually) excellent spam filtering.

I don’t know how any of that works with Zoho! But now I’m intrigued… The Zoho apps that I have experienced have typically been great. If their email client follows along the same tradition, this could be pretty cool.

And finally, we now have an answer towards the “this is great stuff, but how will Zoho ever monetize it” question that has been asked all over the web.

More info at this video or shared notebook.

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