The Six Five team discusses Zoho Trident.

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Transcript:.

Daniel Newman: Zoho launched Trident this week. It’s a new app that’s designed to be central communications, organizational hub. It’s trying to centralize access to email, messaging, phone, video, and also optimizing task management, calendaring. It’s becoming a bit of a trend in the industry to see these apps companies consolidate. I think, in many ways, Zoho and Trident is the company’s answer to a little bit of what Teams is doing, a little bit of what Salesforce and Slack is doing, and it’s the opportunity to really execute across its Zoho One strategy to say, “We’re going to give you an all-in-one set of tools that can enable a company to handle your UC, your project management, your marketing, pulling it all together and scaling the business.” Interestingly, Trident sits on top of the Workplace, which has been a really big growth engine for Zoho.

Yeah, I think they were growing, I think they’re saying something around 30% right now, Pat, 16 million users. And again, really designed to be a central work hub. Zoho is going upmarket. And so as you and I know, when we first started advising and working alongside Zoho, they were really focused on an SM market. And now what we’re seeing is the SM and ME, and moving more and more into handling middle-size and larger enterprises. The company really is trying to say, “Hey, we can be the one-stop set of solutions,” whether that’s you need a Slack-like solution, whether you need a Project-like solution, whether you need a Meet-like solution, and they’re really pushing that along. They’re offering a bunch of new and advanced productivity tools. They’ve got Zoho Webinar now, they’ve got their voice platform now they’ve got Cliq, which is their answer to what you’d call Teams or Slack.

We’ve been using Meeting for a while, Pat, but to me, it’s the continued evolution of what I would say a really reasonably priced full suite of solutions for enterprises that are looking to really centralize everything, from finance to ERP, to collaboration to applications. And by the way, Pat, pricing is probably worth noting. I mean their most expensive professional plan on this whole Workplace is $6 a user. And that gives the entire suite of products with 100 GB of mail and similar drive space. And you can go down to as little as a buck a month if you’re looking at the mail-only tier. It’s in public beta right now, Pat, so it’s something that people can start to use. But my take on the whole thing it’s a consolidation play, it’s a centralization play for companies that are looking for a single solution, reasonably priced, to really bring together all of its comms, collab, meeting, as well as the ability to connect easily to CRM, Project and ERP. Zoho is a really interesting play if you’re looking in that particular mix.

And I think what they’ve built with Zoho Workplace is an interesting competition, especially to that smaller enterprise company that’s looking for either an alternative to a Salesforce or Teams type of integration at scale. And so good announcement, Zoho continues to plot along great growth, and that’s because I think it’s really reasonable and a very complete solution.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s interesting Dan, I agree with many of the things that you said. I will characterize something different though in that Zoho was at the lead in terms of unified suite. They were there before Microsoft, they were there before Google, they were definitely there before Salesforce, who is just starting to create a full stack. So technically, I would say that everybody’s following Zoho. Now, in terms of market share and notoriety, absolutely not. And the funny thing about Trident, and you can hit both our articles on Forbes, is that you can imagine how easy this was for Zoho, because they have a full stack, not only of the software, but also in their core infrastructure. And essentially, what they did is they integrated, and again, people always think that software is easy, but I guess what I’m saying is, is that they integrated products that were based on these same core architecture on the same core infrastructure.

So their ability to do this is a heck of a lot easier than, let’s say, a Salesforce that might have four or five different kinds of code that it has to integrate. Even Oracle went through about six or seven years of integration, and then they put the Redwood UI on top as a nice cherry on top. But these things take time. So I think then it gets into the integrations that they did for Trident, and I think they make sense. Communication, chat, video, email, in one place if you want it, I think is the one that I could see being used probably most of all. And then the other part I think that is nice is that you don’t have to use every single one of Zoho’s modules. They do have integration of Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Box, even Google Workspace. So it’s kind of like you have your cake and eat it too. If you don’t like one of the modules that come in Trident and you want to use something else on Workplace, you can use what you might consider best of breed.

I do think it’s a super interesting time for the company also, and I had a great conversation with their CEO, did a video with him a couple of weeks back, how SaaS multiples have gone down so much. And Zoho is a bootstrapped company, and therefore their ability to invest hasn’t changed at all. And with the economic downturn, people are looking for packages that are fully integrated that, let’s say, again, I’m not denigrating anything in Zoho, but let’s say it brings 90% of the features to the table for half the price. That is a really freaking good value proposition and everybody’s looking at consolidation plays during this time, including Microsoft, Google, I haven’t seen anything from Salesforce yet. Again, congratulations to Zoho on the announcement.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a good one, pat. And it was a good point about two things, calling it out early, that they’ve been in the lead in terms of building a unified workspace. I think these advancements are taking it to a much more user-friendly. And the other thing that you called out I think that’s really worth double-clicking on is that people can continue to use preferred apps while integrating here, meaning you don’t have to give up Zoom or other tools that you actually enjoy in order to get the benefit of that unified workspace.