Swisscom rolling out Zoho apps

I got a heads up from Zoli that Zoho business is now live. This comes on the back of the announcement by Zoho that Swisscom, Switzerland’s second largest telco, is using Zoho for it business applications requirements. Zoho has created a customised version of their applications and this has been made available to Swisscom’s 300000 customers.

Zoho business is a lovely little (or not so little) offering that includes office productivity, calendaring, contact management and mail. All in all it is a one-stop-shop for businesses basic software needs I’ll post specifically about Zoho business later.

Apparently Swisscom also use Gmail for their email needs which in itself is interesting – most Telco’s have gone the way of Microsoft hosted email solutions, it’s noteworthy that a telco, that is generally abut selling top shelf offerings, would go the way of free.

Swisscom have created a SaaS portal, Teamnet, which is pretty much the sort of aggregative SaaS platform that I posted about recently. Swisscom makes available the following offerings;

• Zoho business apps
• Teamspace collaboration service
• Trust room conferencing services
• Easy CRM
• Project tracker

Teamnet is free until October 2008, thereafter Swisscom will begin charging for the services. It’s a very smart move for a Telco – their traditional revenue stream is being decimated, they’re generally good at large scale infrastructure projects and they’re totally used to a subscription model revenue stream.