Yankee Group recently released a report - 'Business Collaboration Tournament: And You Thought the Madness Was Over' that matches up 16 of the top business collaboration vendors in a head-to-head contest. We are glad to see Zoho included in here along with some industry heavy weights. Its a good read. The complete article is available here (Sorry, its a PDF).

These are the 16 vendors considered for this article divided into two pools - like a Basketball game.

In the first round, Yankee matches up Zoho and Google. Here is what they have to say...

Collaboration fans could not have asked for a more exciting first round matchup. However, the misinformed fan might want to double-check where to place his or her bets. To the average fan, Google is the clear winner because a. it’s Google and b. all journalists in the space use Google Apps as their example when referring to web-based productivity suites. However, like Apple, Google is a consumer company and in a matchup against SMB-focused Zoho, Google’s business solutions do not stack up.
....
Google’s Gmail (e-mail), Calendar (shared calendaring) and Talk (IM with VoIP, presence and file-sharing capabilities) are top-tier online collaboration and communications solutions. However, Zoho is SMB-focused and Google is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. IT departments have not been convinced that the service-level agreements (SLAs) Google offers with Google Apps Premier Edition are worthy of a total conversion to cloud computing. Both Google and Zoho suffer from this roadblock, among others. But for Zoho, it’s do or die; whereas for Google, it’s do or continue to make billions in online search and advertising.

The last comment above is interesting. If this sounds familiar, this is because Sridhar already talked about this.

...but in the end, Zoho’s Head Coach pushes it into the Elite Eight in a decisive victory over Google.

According to Yankee, Zoho wins over Google in the first round.

The round of Elite Eight is an interesting one with Zoho positioned against Verizon. This is an interesting comparison.

This Elite Eight thriller has some interesting mismatches on the floor between the telecommunications powerhouse Verizon Business and the agile web-based collaboration and productivity services provider Zoho.

With detailed analysis, Yankee advances Zoho to the next round.

In the end, Zoho squeaks by Verizon Business into the Final Four and continues its Cinderella run in the Yankee Group 2008 Business Collaboration Tournament due to its product road map. Without a focus on community-centric solutions, Verizon Business’ game is too communications-centric and therefore too old-school to make it to the Final Four in 2008.

This puts Zoho in final four against Microsoft, IBM & Cisco. These are some big names to be compared with. The analysis goes on to describe how Microsoft goes on to win against Zoho.

Sure, we are not the winner here nor do we expect to be so. Being considered as part of the final four is a privilege. As we always said, we understand that this is not a zero sum game. We are focused on building great affordable apps and let the market decide.

The article contains lots of other details about all 16 vendors covered. It is a good read with good analysis of the existing business collaboration market.

Ian Wenig, Senior Director Strategic Alliances at Zoho got interviewed by Daniel Brusilovsky at the Structure 08 event presented by GigaOm. The interview is now up at Daniel's Apple Universe podcasting site.

.

Thanks to Daniel.

If you are following the status of Zooomr, Mark III is up and running. If you are not, Zoli has a good writeup.

Zooomr is a photo service supported by some awesome fans across the globe. Prior to the recent Zooomr episode, I just heard about it but never paid any attention. But when Scoble called for help in his blog, we discussed internally and thought we can help Zooomr. We know how challenging it is to run a company initially without raising any capital. We have been there (For those of you who don't know, Zoho/AdventNet after 11 years is still privately owned, self-funded and a very profitable company) and we decided to help Kris Tate and Thomas Hawk.

Once Robert Scoble put us in touch with Kris and Thomas, things moved fast. We managed to get Zooomr into one of our Zoho/AdventNet data centers and couple of days later, Zooomr Mark III is online.

The Zooomr community was exceptional. I received close to 100 emails thanking us for helping Zooomr. I can clearly say that these are very passionate Zooomr users. To quote some...

Hi, Zoho team,

I wanted to drop you a note to tell you how much the Zooomr community appreciates your assistance in these difficult times. You have no idea how much respect and appreciation you have garnered because of this selfless act.

Having worked in the tech industry for a number of years, I find the times that a company has reached out to assist at this level and this speed to be severely lacking. You have not only shown up the big guys, but you have earned a devoted following because of it.

Keep up the great work and thank you again,

Raju and the rest of the Zoho crew,

Much thanks and the highest appreciation for all you've done for Zooomr. I hope that as a community we've adequately displayed our thanks. Your quick response in our time of need is incredibly admirable. It's allowing Zooomr to grow as a community and reach our goal of doing incredible things with photo sharing.

If there is anything I or any of us can do, don't hesitate to ask.

Please keep the faith, and many happy returns!

Thanks,

Hi Raju,

I hope you've already had an awful lot of praise for doing this, but I
wanted to add mine to the heap.

Zoho's assistance no doubt helped Zooomr - specifically Kris Tate - in
a physical sense, but more importantly it will have helped in an
emotional sense. Without Zoho's assistance, the psychological hill
that Kris needed to climb would have seemed all the more
insurmountable.

My faith in humanity, the web community, and good old fashioned
technology has been boosted enormously by the support Zooomr have
received.

So thanks!

Cheers,

Kudos to Zooomr guys for being very transperant to the community on whatever they did while their service was down. The community also created a Wiki (in Zoho Wiki) on the status of the service. Over the next few days, I assume Kris will be busy fine tuning Mark III.

We are glad we could help Zooomr. We wish them good luck.

Me personally, I just created a Zooomr account. I am heading there to upload some of my photos.

Zoho is one of the finalist for Webware 100 awards (to be announced after June 11). According to webware, 250 finalists were selected by their editors from over 2,000 web 2.0 services nominated. We are one of the 250 finalists broken into 10 categories. Each category currently has 25 finalists of which 10 will be selected (based on your voting) as part of the final Webware 100.

Zoho is listed under 'Productivity' category. We'd love to win your vote under this category.

Earlier this month Sridhar Vembu and I had a brief discussion with Robert Scoble on various Zoho related topics. Scoble posted these videos (Discussion with Sridhar and Notebook Demo) in PodTech. Also, check out his blog post 'Zoho: the office disrupters'. Below are the videos.

We are glad to announce a partnership with WebEx. Zoho is excited to be part of WebEx Connect.

The partnership starts with Zoho CRM integration and will span across most of Zoho applications. The next update of Zoho CRM will have the ability to schedule/start WebEx Meetings directly from Zoho CRM interface. Here is a quick screenshot.

Here is a press release on this.

Looking forward for a strong relationship.

Raju

Update : For a quick overview, please have a look at the video on Zoho CRM - WebEx Integration

Live Demo: http://webex.zohocrm.com

User Name/Password: demo@zohocrm.com/demouser

This is how it looks.... any guess??