The scope of UCaaS keeps expanding and changing every year, according to Rakeeb Rafeeque, Product Marketing Manager at Zoho.
Rafeeque made the comments during a chat with UC Today following Zoho’s announcement that it was releasing its own unified communications offering.
The collaboration vendor is establishing its Zoho Workplace product as a unified office platform that combines collaboration, productivity, and communications tools.
Rafeeque commented: “We started off with UCaaS being meetings, conferencing and your audio and video calls in the same place.
“Then it had your messaging layer in the same place, and then a presence factor was added, especially with hybrid work coming in.
“Now there’s the talks about CX also being part of this as well as having an office suite.
“So, I think as the scope of UCaaS expands, Zoho becomes the perfect platform because we have all of this built-in already.”
Entering the UCaaS Space
It is no secret that UCaaS platforms have boomed following the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the market becoming saturated with different offerings.
These platforms have developed over time to the point where many offer a ‘one product does all’ type of experience.
Microsoft and Google are arguably the biggest players in offering communication and collaboration tools with the Office and Workspace suites.
However, this kind of offering is nothing new to Zoho, with the company stating earlier this month that its Workplace platform had grown 30 percent year-over-year, with more than 16 million users worldwide.
Zoho also claimed that migrations from leading collaboration vendors, such as Microsoft and Google, to the platform had almost doubled in 2022, and it is clear that the company is will play to its ‘one product does all’ strengths.
Rafeeque said: “Zoho has always been big on the suite experience. It was set up in such a way that you could let someone run their entire business on Zoho; that was the mantra that we had, even before it was cool.
“We’ve had Zoho Click as our team collaboration app since 2016, and we also had Zoho Meetings, so it’s not a knee-jerk reaction what we’re doing. Zoho as a company doesn’t do that; everything is long-rooted.
“We have extended what Zoho has been doing in the communication and collaboration space as we believe that, collaboration, productivity and communications are like a wrapper around the entire business; we don’t see it as a separate thing.
“So, we have always been there, but since the market wanted a little more, especially UC as a bundle, then we thought it was the right thing to offer.”
Zoho attributes the substantial growth to increasing business demand for simplified, streamlined solutions that maintain standards for user privacy, as well as rising costs from other collaboration platform providers.
