Mumbai : Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu says the company chose to build its own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on services from major providers such as AWS and Google Cloud. Vembu said Zoho started building its own infrastructure in the early days of the company to run its applications. This includes several of the basic systems needed to operate cloud software, including databases, identity, messaging, search, storage and computing.
He said Zoho built these systems itself rather than depending on AWS or Google Cloud. The company has since opened this infrastructure to developers through Catalyst. Catalyst was originally created as a way for developers to extend Zoho applications. Zoho is putting more investment into Catalyst and will make the platform free for students. The company wants students to be able to build and deploy applications without having to worry about infrastructure costs while they work on their projects.
The move also fits with Vembu’s earlier comments about how Zoho builds and runs its products. In a September 2025 post, he addressed questions about where the company’s software is developed, where customer data is stored and which companies provide the infrastructure behind Zoho’s services. He also said Indian customer data is hosted in India, with data centres in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai at the time of his post, with another planned in Odisha.
He also said Zoho does not host its products on AWS or Azure. Some services from large cloud companies may be used for regional switching nodes, which can help improve traffic speeds, but Vembu said the data is not stored on those services. Zoho is also adding more points of presence in different locations. Vembu has recently spoken about another issue facing software developers: the growing use of AI tools to write code.
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