As Zoho expands its enterprise portfolio, how do you prevent complexity from creeping in while still encouraging innovation?
Zoho addresses complexity through a combination of internal usage, design reviews, and disciplined product validation. Every new solution is first deployed internally, which we call ‘eating our own dog food.’ With close to 18,000 employees worldwide using Zoho and ManageEngine tools, this internal ecosystem becomes a large-scale testing ground.
Additionally, UI/UX, security, and privacy reviews are built into the development process, and beta customers are engaged early to provide real-world feedback. When a solution risks adding unnecessary complexity, the team is empowered to make the hard call to simplify, even if it means going back to the drawing board. This approach preserves agility while ensuring innovation remains usable, scalable, and customer-friendly.
With enterprises consolidating vendors and scrutinising ROI, how has that shaped what Zoho chooses to build and not build?
Zoho’s philosophy has remained consistent: build within its means, take a long-term view, and stay true to what benefits the customer. Being privately held, the company isn’t driven by short-term shareholder pressure, so it avoids shortcuts and fads.
Rather than pursuing every market opportunity, Zoho focuses R&D on areas that directly enhance value for enterprise customers, particularly platforms, security, and AI integration. By investing more in R&D instead of marketing, Zoho ensures that innovation and engineering quality drive customer satisfaction and organic growth.
As enterprise platforms become more interconnected, how does Zoho design its architecture to limit blast radius, so a failure or breach in one product doesn’t cascade across the stack?
Zoho’s data centre and product architectures are intentionally designed for fault isolation. Each country operates an independent data centre that doesn’t interact with others, hence minimising the blast radius of a potential issue and supporting local compliance with data protection laws.
On the engineering side, products follow asynchronous messaging patterns and avoid tight coupling between services. Regular code reviews and automated analysis make sure these rules are maintained, ensuring operational resilience and limiting cross-system exposure during failures or breaches.
What are the cybersecurity strategies Zoho is approaching as the attacks have gone from enterprises to geographies?
Cybersecurity is one of Zoho’s top three focus areas for 2026 and beyond, alongside AI and platform development. ManageEngine is rolling out a new wave of security products, including next-generation antivirus, anti-ransomware, cloud-based SIEM, and Zero Trust access solutions.
The goal is to address the growing strategic role of IT while helping CIOs manage evolving security threats with a single, dependable vendor across multiple layers. Every launch is guided by Zoho’s commitment to being a long-term, stable partner, not just a product provider, in the global technology landscape.
How critical are channel partners to Zoho’s growth, and how do you prevent ecosystem fragmentation at scale?
Zoho’s local presence strategy, hiring and training local teams in each market, reflects a strong partnership mindset. Senior leaders from India help establish offices abroad, then empower local teams in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Thailand, and Singapore.
This ‘transnational localism’ ensures customer proximity without diluting Zoho’s unified culture or standards. It’s an approach inspired by Japanese and Korean business models: a strong connection to the headquarters, local hiring for last-mile execution, and skill investment within each region. This model allows Zoho’s partner ecosystem and customer reach to expand sustainably and cohesively.
What did Zoho’s data centre investments in Saudi Arabia and the UAE signal to customers about trust and long-term commitment?
The new data centres in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are a clear demonstration of Zoho’s deepening commitment to the region. After 15 years of partner-led presence, the company now runs full local offices, around 80 people in Dubai and about half that in Saudi Arabia, with locally based compliance and security teams.
By operating its own infrastructure and aligning with national data laws, Zoho signals reliability and intent to be a long-term partner. The investments also align with growing government digitisation efforts in both markets, where Zoho expects an increase in enterprise and public-sector adoption.
As AI adoption accelerates, which data governance or sovereignty risks do CEOs most often underestimate?
The biggest underestimated risk is data leakage from AI model interactions. Zoho tackles this through choice and transparency: enterprises can bring their own keys to secure hosted large models, use open-source models on Zoho’s infrastructure, or choose models developed by Zoho itself.
If customers select Zoho-built models, they can be assured that data never leaves Zoho’s data centres. This multi-option strategy balances control, compliance, and functionality, giving CIOs and governments confidence over data sovereignty in an AI-driven era.
Looking ahead, what should customers and partners realistically expect from Zoho over the next few years?
Zoho will continue advancing in three focus fronts – AI, security, and platform enablement. Expect a lineup of new cybersecurity and enterprise tools, deeper AI integration across products (both classical and generative), and broader adoption of the ‘platform’ approach, enabling enterprises to customise and build on Zoho systems.
At the same time, Zoho remains committed to its founding principles: long-term thinking, independence, customer-centric design, and reinvestment in R&D. Whether through transnational localism or privacy‑by‑design practices, Zoho’s next chapter will continue to blend innovation with trust and sustainability.
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