Why Best-of-suite Digital Workplace Solutions Are Right Choice For Businesses

With all that is happening across the business world, it's safe to say we're in an era of readjustment today. Slow growth and profitability pressures have driven companies to consider cost reduction, employee efficiency, and a holistic radicalisation of IT spend as immediate damage-control measures.

Single-product vendors have been scrambling for survival as a result. Figma, Slack, and Zoom are all examples of products that had to merge with a larger suite (or create one themselves, as in the case of Zoom) owing to this market condition.

A best-of-suite digital workplace tool, like Zoho Workplace, Microsoft 365, or Google Workspace, offer similar alternatives to these standalone tools along with email, calendar, files, documents, and more. "What can standalone tools offer that workplace suites cannot?" and "How can we justify additional spending for these tools?" are all questions companies and their IT leaders are asking themselves today.

The universal nature of suites by themselves make the case of digital workplaces stronger. Everybody in an organisation uses email, chat, word processor, file storage, and other tools. Having these natively integrated—with better interoperability, data-flow, contextual hand-offs, and uniform user experience—just makes more sense than having them in different windows and tabs.

The Case For Suites

Customers shy away from suites owing to integration advancements that seem to be making interoperability between best-of-breed apps more seamless. However, with vendor marketplaces, out-of-the-box integrations, split-delivery, and integration workflow management apps, digital workplace solutions offer enough headroom to accommodate a third-party application within them, while continuing to offer the benefit of the same unified user experience.

Employees, who have become familiar with some tools over the years, can be resistant to change. But in this case, they can adopt the "new tool" better because a unified digital workplace lets them do multiple things at once. There are many instances where employees who resisted the change at first, later adopted these suites quickly because being on a suite meant they could simplify their day-to-day operations.

To summarise, here are five ways a best-of-suite digital workplace is the better way ahead for companies of all sizes:

1. A virtual HQ in a single place

A unified homepage is the simplest way for employees to start their day. Imagine the time and effort saved in opening a single tab to view your latest emails, documents, meetings, and calendar events vs. opening a separate tab for each of those and juggling them every morning.

2. Email is a difficult puzzle to solve

Unified digital workplace companies spent decades perfecting email services so they can prevent spam, are secure, and offer at least 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee.

Considering how email and calendars are tightly coupled at the heart of every enterprise, a digital workplace that uses the same calendaring and email solution makes it easier for enterprises to work seamlessly sans tangled integration cables.

3. Unified business graphs

When you have all your data in one place, it's also easier for a company-wide AI assistant to bring that data to you in meaningful responses during a query.

Imagine searching for an employee's name and immediately looking at all the messages, documents, emails, and calendar events from that person, at one go.

Or how about the AI writing assistant automatically pulling up information from your company's custom dictionary and not marking your employees' names as spelling errors!

4. Better security controls

Organisations can set up information access restrictions, monitor devices used, implement multi-factor authentication as well as password policies for all employees across email, file management, chat, and similar tools at once.

5. Value

Digital workplace solutions are often less expensive than purchasing multiple best-of-breed tools separately, as suite providers offer discounted pricing for bundled solutions.

Additionally, since all the tools in a best-of-suite solution are designed to work together, the need for costly integration efforts (as in the case of best-of-breed solutions) is ruled out. This will eventually reduce both integration and training costs, as employees only need to learn one set of tools.

Looking Ahead

While the economic conditions have shown an uptick in customers opting for unified suites, it will be interesting to see how a lot of the newly formed or expanded suites (like Zoom One) add enough value and capability to create a strong case for themselves compared to long-term suite players that already provide a bouquet of critical apps for enterprises.

Rakeeb Rafeek

Guest Author The author is Product Strategy Lead, Zoho Workplace, Zoho Corp.