With all the thunder and lightning between Google and Microsoft on the Saas/S+S front, it's easy to lose track of some of the other, very competetive, players in the SaaS office market. Of these, Zoho is probably the best known, and as it labors quietly in the shadow of two giants, it may well be creating something that looks far more like the real future of the online enterprise office suite than either Google or Microsoft have come up with yet.

Today the company announced an HR management solution package called People. People bundles HR functions from recruiting to benefits administration to termination in a hosted application that heavily incorporates self-service mechanisms to lower HR overhead and improve data accuracy. You can take a quick spin at the beta site, linked above. In and of itself, it's nothing revolutionary for HR management; but it represents another piece of the business application puzzle added to Zoho's already impressive suite of a la carte SaaS offerings.

That may be the office suite of the future, right there. Where Google charges you for the whole bundle of Apps, and Microsoft only sells Office with particular combinations of applications, at Zoho you can mix and match individual applications right down on a per-user basis, with subscription licensing that means you can change up the combination at any time as the job demands. Their early-adopter approach to iPhone and other mobile device integration makes many of those applications available anywhere you can get a cell signal. And their plugins for existing Microsoft Office applications make the transition easy, for those businesses who find a need to exist half-way between the two models for the moment.

It's unlikely that Zoho will eat anyone's lunch in this space; if they become too successful, either Google or Microsoft is bound to make a play for them (Ballmer's already got his checkbook out, after all), but I think that would be a shame. If they can stay under the radar for a while longer, I think they have an excellent chance to define what will be the future of the cloud-based office suite.