Watch Out Google Apps, Here Comes ZOHO Business

Google launched their white-label app service mid to late last year, for small businesses, schools and personal use. From that point onwards this has been quite a hit as many start-ups and families have started utilizing their services. I too use their services for my personal domain.

This is quite a nascent space where folks like Google are gaining some ground. Most of these services have been offered for free, however the small business editions are being offered for a premium.

Zoho on the other hand broke onto the scene early last year as one of the strong players in the web office space. Zoho has been a very aggressive company, frequently releasing new features to bring a 360 degree offering. Until now this has been seen as a play to offer cheap alternative to Microsoft Office. This offering however was labeled as a personal edition. Anyone could have registered and used their services for free.

Now they are making a pretty interesting move and enabling the business edition of this service, squarely aimed at start-ups and small businesses. Their goal is to become the IT department for small businesses. To this end they are bringing their online portfolio to a customizable white-labled offering. The portfolio contains the following features:

• Writer, Sheet, Show,
• Wiki, Planner, Notebook
• Chat, Mail, Calendar
• Start Page, Domain management
• more..

The aforementioned features will be packaged for the small businesses and can be deployed on their custom domains. ZOHO will offer following services to the businesses utilizing their services:

• Single sign on across applications
• Company level administration console
• Multiple levels of security including SSL
• Telephone support
• Remote back-up
• Document and data storage management self service
• Co-branding

This is a very strong move and their feature/service offering is much better than Google. ZOHO is currently in private beta and offering services selectively. Check out the video below from ZOHO.

I have applied for the beta and will post once I get to use it myself.