July 15, 2008, 5:21 PM — Zoho, maker of an online suite of collaborative and business productivity applications, has landed a six-month pilot partnership with Swisscom to deliver its products to the telecom's 300,000 business customers.
A custom edition of Zoho Business, including word processing, spreadsheets, content sharing and meeting applications will be available on Swisscom's Teamnet portal for SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, which is in a pilot phase through October.
Swisscom said in a statement that it chose Zoho because it provides a wide range of applications and has a solid engineering team.
The Swisscom partnership follows Zoho's recent announcement that it had landed a distribution deal with the large Chinese online distributor Baihui.
The two pacts symbolize the growing acceptance of the SaaS application delivery model, where Zoho competes with the likes of Google Apps.
In a recent blog post announcing an enterprise customer win, a Google executive claimed that 3,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps each day.
Competition is set to heat up further next year, when Microsoft launches its own hosted collaboration suite.
