If you are a small or medium business and you haven’t heard of Zoho yet, you should check it out—the company might have an app for you, perhaps even for free. The name alludes to small office, home office, i.e., SOHO, although some products are suited to larger companies.

The Web-based mini apps of the Zoho Office Suite are a great example of the trend of the atomization of user experience. This is in tune with the Long Tail Theory, according to which companies will compete on ever-smaller and more specific product footprints and capabilities to satisfy ever-smaller niches, and all in a plug-and-play manner. Forrester has also noted a “business technology (BT)” trend, describing pervasive use by casual users in lines of business (LoBs) of technology that is increasingly managed outside the direct control of IT departments.

Certainly Zoho is fulfilling a demand for easy-to-use cloud and mobile apps for productivity, collaboration, and communication that aren’t bogged down by the need to customize and manage this functionality within an enterprise-wide system. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, more and more companies are breaking down into a slew of collaborative networks of smaller organizations with ever greater specialization. In this new ad-hoc collaborative world, most companies are small, lean, and nimble, relying on extensive supplier networks. Companies have multiple clients and contracts across a globally diverse workforce available on a supply-and-demand (as needed) basis. These trends are giving rise to a massive and rapidly growing “contingent” workforce that will make up to 40 percent of the entire workforce by 2020 (currently at 30 percent, according to CNNMoney). BusinessWeek reported that 26 percent of employees in 2005 had nonstandard jobs, i.e., temps, part-timers, independent contractors, freelancers, free agents, self-employed, so-called “micropreneurs,” and so on.

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Zoho has announced the Zoho CRM Document Library—an application that allows sales teams to share sales collateral, materials, proposals, and other relevant material. The tool is integrated with Zoho CRM, allowing users to access documents from within Zoho while avoiding the use of external document management systems such as Zoho Docs or Google docs. Read the rest of this entry »