Launching Elder, Charmer, and Healer. They’re not products. They’re hills we’ve built in our campus to plant trees. Elder is the tallest. Charmer brings flowers and beauty. Healer is for medicinal trees and plants. For the last 30 years, we’ve built software products across different domains and industries. Yet over the last decade, we’ve also been working on something very different, something that could last for centuries, something that sustains itself. Something that won't get impacted with AI ☺️ We launched it quietly at Zoholics. rootedinzoho.com/

Opinion: Zoho One / Zoho workplace could replace 80+% of Microsoft 365 Office suite users at a small fraction of the cost. If GoI promotes these, we could save a Billion Dollar forex outflow.

Why does an IT company campus have to look like an IT campus? 🙂 "Curved streets create an inherent sense of mystery, because their vistas reveal themselves only gradually, as one's movement changes one's perspective.” — Camillo Sitte Instead of building another boring corporate block, it's an campus with lot of curved streets, trees, shops and places to meet. A peek into the open-air theatre (OAT), the terrace garden and the curved streets...

It's still the best 😉. It hasn't disappeared. We just don't spend much time talking about ourselves. We spend our time enhancing products, adding new products, serving more customers and expanding into new verticals. More than 50,000 new customers around the world choose Zoho every month. The business continues to grow. Companies don't have to be in the news to grow.

Net worth numbers are paper wealth tied to fluctuating stock markets. What we really need to celebrate is the Top 100 Taxpayers in India. While wealth rankings show who is richest, a tax-payer list shows who is actively funding the nation's public infrastructure, government schools, and healthcare. Infrastructure development happens at the tax counter and not on a stock ticker.

For your business to be successful, don't position things internally to make them look better than they are.

In early 2000, we built a cloud framework to build our SaaS applications. Over the next 20 years, we built more than 100 applications across Zoho and ManageEngine on that same foundation. IAM, messaging, databases, columnar databases, search, caching, queues, storage and many other common services were built as part of the platform and reused across applications. We opened those framework services in Catalyst as serverless platform. After building and running 100+ applications, we started seeing the common patterns. We abstracted them, and over time, the application platform emerged. Now we are using that platform to build applications deeply tailored to specific industries. Zoho RetailIQ for retail. Zoho AutoDMS for automotive. Zoho LOS for BFSI. MedScribe for healthcare. Zoho Campus and Zoho Classes for education. Zoho POS for restaurants. We are also building Zoho for Real Estate, around the workflows specific to brokers and builders. This is what happens when 20 years of building products compounds into a platform that can be used to build many more. You don't get this kind of compounding by acquiring products and stitching them together for growth. That is why this is more than just adding vertical applications to Zoho. This is just the beginning.

Introducing Zia Chat Great work happens when people, processes and technology work together naturally. You shouldn’t have to keep pushing against software to get your work done. Today, we are taking that idea into AI. We are already used to chatting with AI for our personal questions and tasks. But at work, AI is still mostly trapped inside individual applications. Why should you have to know which app to open before you can ask AI to do something? That’s why we built Zia Chat. One AI interface for your work across applications. Find information, understand context, take action, and create documents, presentations or spreadsheets using data from different services. With MCP integrations, Zia Chat can also connect with the third-party applications your business use. No more forcing your work through individual applications. Just ask. Let AI take it from there.

It's good to see Starbucks setting up a GCC in Chennai. It would be even better if we could bring more GCCs to other parts of Tamil Nadu. Instead of moving people to where the jobs are, we should also take the jobs to where the talent is. We should make each district compete to bring GCCs to their district. Rather than relying on district administration, engineering colleges in each district should take on that role. Like placement officers, they should have a dedicated team to attract global companies to invest in their district. A high-paying job in a smaller town can create many supporting jobs around it and help spread economic growth across the state. We have good talent across Tamil Nadu. We should make it possible for more global companies to build their teams outside Chennai too.

I was speaking to a 22-year-old nurse recently. She shared some news about one of her relatives getting a post in a political party. Her immediate reaction was, “Will they earn a lot of money from this post?” I asked her, “How will they earn money from it?” She said, “Won’t the government give them?” I asked her, “How does the government get its money?” That led to a conversation about how the government gets its money, where taxes come from, how government spending is funded, and even how the things we call “free” are actually paid for. It made me think about how basic we assume this knowledge is. Do we actually know how many students understand where the government gets its money? We often assume something is basic knowledge because it is obvious to us. But is it actually obvious to everyone? Shouldn't every student know where the government gets its money, where it spends it, how government employees are paid, and who ultimately pays for the things the government provides? Shouldn't this be part of basic education?

Today I watched some interesting discussions from the ALL IN Summit in Montreal. Around the same time, I was also watching videos from the Meenakshi Amman Temple Kumbhabhishekam in Madurai. I wasn't at either event, but I couldn't stop thinking about how different they were, and yet how similar. Both brought huge numbers of people together. Both created good business for the local economy. But people came for very different reasons. At ALL IN, investors, founders and businesses came together to learn, share ideas and make connections. It is an investment seeking a return. At the other, lakhs of people came together for something much harder to explain. People travelled hundreds of kilometres, waited for hours and stood in huge crowds. It is spending seeking peace. Why do people do this? Because we don't live by utility alone. We want to belong. We want connection. We want identity, faith, experience and meaning. Sometimes we simply want to be part of something. This is why predicting the impact of technology is difficult. AI can understand these behaviours. It can write about them. But understanding why people do something doesn't mean you can make them stop wanting it. AI may change what we do. It may change how we work, learn, create and consume. It may even make many things we do today unnecessary. But it won't necessarily change what we want. And I believe that is what will continue to sustain human life in an AI world.

10,000+ users. 15 business verticals. 10M+ customers. Motilal Oswal has built a unified enterprise operation on Zoho across all of them. We are very happy to partner with them on this journey. The interesting part is bringing 15 different businesses onto one platform while still preserving the governance and requirements of each business. That's real enterprise scale.

After listening to Dr. Pratosh's talk, I started thinking about how often we underestimate human behaviour when predicting the impact of technology. Let us look at some unexpected outcomes of technologies from previous decades. 1. What happened to watches when mobile phones came? 2. Music is almost free on the internet. Why do people still go to concerts? 3. What happened to theatres when TV and then streaming services came? 4. A PC and a speaker can play a prayer. Why do people still go to temples and want a human to recite it? Even in a temple, you don't need AI to replace the priest. A speaker can already do it. 5. When COVID made WFH the norm, there were predictions that offices would become unnecessary and commercial real estate would collapse. Commercial real estate was certainly affected, but offices didn't disappear. Many companies later brought people back to the office. The problem with many technology / human behaviour predictions is that we reduce human behaviour to functional utility. But people value much more than the function itself. People don't consume only for utility. They consume for status, identity, belonging, experience and, of course, FOMO. People don't go to university only for knowledge. They go there for the status of the institution, the people they meet, the network and the experience. The same is true of brands. If everything was based on utility, a ₹1 lakh luxury watch shouldn't have more value than a ₹1,000 watch that tells the same time. But humans don't make choices like that. We tend to make our predictions rationally, but human behaviour doesn't always follow the same logic. This is why I am not sure we can predict what will happen to humans when AI takes over intellectual work simply by looking at what AI can replace. AI may make knowledge and code abundant. It may make many existing jobs unnecessary. But will human curiosity, restlessness, status seeking, peer pressure and the desire for experiences go away? I believe we are better at adapting to the future than predicting it.

Nitin Gadkari said he took an hour to travel from Worli to the airport because of traffic. His suggestion is to use technology to build more flyovers, including multi-level flyovers. During travel, I have noticed that some countries manage traffic much better than others. The choice of transport is also very different from country to country, and I think this has a lot to do with policy and how the transport system is designed. The choice of transport is not just an individual choice. Government policy and how the transport infrastructure is connected influence the travel choice of the individual. Beyond the infrastructure, technology should also be used in other areas to solve the problem and give better travel experience to people. -Charge more for using congested roads during peak hours. -Give tax benefits for using public transport or shared transport. -Integrate ticketing across suburban trains, Metro and buses. -Create dedicated bus lanes so buses don't get stuck in the same traffic. -Improve last-mile connectivity with feeder buses and better walking routes. The goal of any transport system should not only be speed. It should also be predictability. If a journey takes 45 minutes every day, people can plan their lives around it. If it takes 45 minutes one day and 90 minutes the next, it becomes a very different problem. Mumbai already has a large public transport system. We should make it easier and more predictable for people to use it, instead of only creating more space for cars. I used AI to capture some interesting data & also compare Mumbai with Singapore to build this page. The details are here: traffic-capacity-vkqdhzrw.on…

Yes. We don’t use force anywhere at Zoho. No forced sales. No forced slacking. No forced growth. Do the work. The rest happens naturally.

Blaming the past is a poor excuse for not having a vision for the future.

Hope our cities get this kind of stormwater drain to prevent waterlogging. Otherwise, this is the DIY solution we end up with on our streets to drain the water.

Seeing so many cycles on the road in this video reminds me of cycling to school. My friend used to cycle 5.5 km to school every day through Velachery Main Road. It was safe to cycle because he would hardly see any buses on the way. If we make cycling safer, more people will use cycles for short local trips. It will reduce the number of cars and bikes on the road and also reduce parking problems. We should make cycling safe again. Economic growth doesn't mean more cars on the road. It should mean a better experience on the road for everyone.

Catalyst 3.0 is here for developers. Software is about to become far more abundant. The question is not how we build software. It is whether our cloud platforms are ready for what is coming. Today, developers still spend a lot of time provisioning infrastructure, deploying frontends, connecting services, managing storage, handling events and running applications. AI is going to change this. When software can be built much faster, we cannot expect developers to spend the same amount of time managing the infrastructure underneath it. Developers should build software. Not infrastructure. This has been the idea behind Catalyst from the beginning. With Catalyst 3.0, we are taking another step towards making the platform AI-native. With MCP support, AI agents can work directly with Catalyst services. They can create a table, deploy a function or ship a frontend without someone having to open a console and do it manually. We are also bringing together Slate for frontend hosting, Signals for events and Stratus for object storage, along with app hosting, data, authentication, scheduling and managed browsers. But the best way to explain this is through the developers and teams using Catalyst. Aasheesh Agrawal, Lead - Digital & IT at Eternia by Hindalco, Aditya Birla Group: "A single developer was able to take the solution from concept to a fully deployed, production-ready application within a short span of time." Dr. Prabhakaran, Chief Executive Officer at We the Leaders Foundation: "Catalyst enabled us to get the platform operational in a few weeks through AI-assisted development, without compromising security." This is what we want Catalyst to do. Give developers the freedom to build & let the platform take care of the infrastructure.