Harshendu

Long term Twitter user

[Mani Vembu @MVhandle]

For everyone, WhatsApp has won. For us, giving up would mean letting the other side win.

We know why people use WhatsApp.

Everyone is already there. Your family is there. Your friends are there. Your communities are there.

That’s what makes switching so hard. But every alternative in technology started with someone willing to try. Linux challenged Microsoft. MySQL and PostgreSQL challenged established database ecosystems.

Arattai will challenge WhatsApp.

We’re not asking you to leave anything. Give Arattai a try. Tell us what you like. Tell us what we need to improve.

Because every meaningful alternative exists because someone was willing to be an early adopter.

If you believe technology should have choices, give us a chance.

We’re improving. We’re listening. And we’re not giving up.

[Mani Vembu @MVhandle]

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.

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

It’s that time of the year at Zoho — and even more special this time, as Zoholics kicks off at our home campus.

I’ve watched this place transform over the last 10 years into the vibrant campus it is today. Proud to see it host something this big.

#ZoholicsIndia2026

[Mani Vembu @MVhandle]

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.

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

New architecture:
You → Claude → Salesforce.
Invoice 1: Anthropic.
Invoice 2: Salesforce.
Beneficiary 3: Salesforce’s Anthropic stake.
Elegant.

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

37 prebuilt sales skills.

Meeting prep. Deal health. Pipeline review.

Congratulations, you’ve productized the first three prompts every seller typed into Claude in 2025.

The innovation is the name. The substance is “open beta in September.”

[Salesforce @salesforce]

Marc @Benioff + @DarioAmodei. Live on @CNBCFastMoney.

Watch as they talk Salesforce + @AnthropicAI, the Claudeforce partnership, and what’s next for enterprise AI.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

If you are an engineer or scientist or doctor turning to business, the first thing I would suggest is "Please go on a lot of sales calls, face rejection if necessary, but persist".

You will develop better communication skills as you realise that explaining your ideas is not so easy.

You will develop respect for sales people.

You may even become good at business!

There is no such thing as a business without selling something. Sometimes the most obvious thing has to be said!

[Aswath Damodaran @AswathDamodaran]

It has been less than four years, since ChatGPT made its public debut, but talk of AI has taken over business, investing and even personal conversations. The AI debate, though, has gone off the tracks as people talk past each other and distractions about. My attempt to make sense of it all: https://t.co/SHJe0emQy4

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Zoho keeps doing things the rest of Indian tech has decided are impossible.

They just built its own computer server, but the way they did it is so fascinating.

First, let's understand what a server is. It is the big computer sitting in a data centre that runs your apps. Every time you use Gmail or WhatsApp, a server somewhere does the work.

Almost every server running in India is designed by foreign companies. Indian firms just buy them.

Zoho decided to design its own. And I cannot stop thinking about how they went about it.

They set up the project in Nagpur.

Now, Nagpur had no experienced hardware engineers at all. So Zoho did not hire experts from Dell or HPE. They started a training programme called SETU, hired freshers straight out of engineering colleges, and gave them one hard problem to work on for five years.

Think about that. Every big IT company in India complains that freshers are unemployable.

Zoho took those same freshers, in a smaller city, and got a working server out of them. They have filed more than five patents on the designs, and the key parts were designed fully in-house and put together by Indian manufacturing partners.

So the talent has always been there. A company patient enough to train people was the missing piece.

But why build your own server at all?

Zoho runs all its apps on its own machines. Until now, every server they bought from a foreign company included that company's profit and licence fees.

By designing their own, they get the same performance while using 12 to 18% less electricity, and the total cost of owning each machine drops by 20 to 30%.

With a few hundred servers, that saving is small. But Zoho plans to move all its apps worldwide onto these machines.

Also there is an AI angle. Running AI is expensive because AI needs huge computing power. Zoho's plan is to run smaller, focused AI models on its own servers in its own data centres, to manage costs.

Most companies rent computing power from Amazon or Google but Zoho is attacking the bill at the machine level.

The timing is important too.

In 2023, the Indian government put restrictions on importing hardware like servers. Zoho had already started its server team in Nagpur back in 2020.

Three years before the government rule arrived, Zoho was preparing for a world where India cannot simply import its computers.

So, they moved on their own belief.

The best part is that the design is fully owned in India, Zoho does not depend on any foreign company for security checks, software updates, or licences.

If some country imposes sanctions or a licensing fight breaks out tomorrow, nobody abroad can switch off Zoho's machines.

Zoho has been honest about the fact that the chip inside the server is still an Intel processor, and Intel helped in the development.

That is fine. Every country that builds hardware starts this way. China's server companies started by assembling other people's parts and slowly went deeper. The chip is the next decade's problem.

What I love most is how Zoho-like this whole thing is.

> This company took no investor money in 25 years.

> It opened offices in villages and small towns.

> It hires school students and trains them.

> It built its own browser and its own AI model.

> Now its own server.

Now compare this with the big Indian IT companies. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL.

Together they earn over $250 billion. They have managed the world's computers for decades. But not one of them designed a server of their own.

Even the name is a nice touch. Nathu La is the mountain pass in Sikkim through which India traded with the world on the old Silk Route.

Naming your first server after a trade gateway, while building it so India depends less on imported tech, shows someone thought about this for years.

They have a few hundred servers running today and want 2,000 by the end of the year. Small numbers. But the team is trained, the design works, and the path is proven.

Indian software companies spent 30 years building on other people's machines.

One of them finally built the machine. :)

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Salesforce is running an ad claiming 40% off to beat Zoho. We have watched this playbook for years where they give deep discounts to get you in, followed by aggressive escalation once you're locked-in.

Before you switch anything, ask them to show you standardised multi-year pricing. If they don't, that's your answer. Enterprise software is a con-game of "discount" bullshit by vendors like Salesforce. Buyer beware!

As for "old CRM", Salesforce is a garbage bin of acquired enterprise software companies over decades, held together with bubble gum and duct tape.

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

@aravind @svembu @SuperGrok Answer this

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

At #AutomotiveUSA2025, sharing how SKYLine, our decentralized DMS on Zoho CRM boosts efficiency, data sovereignty, and CX for OEMs worldwide. Let’s rethink automotive loyalty together - from customers to fans!

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Post from Santosh Iyer, Managing Director of Mercedes-Benz India:

"Today, we proudly introduce ‘SKYLine’, our next-generation Dealer Management System, ‘Made in India, for India’, co-created with Zoho, underlining the unmatched prowess of Indian technological innovation, having international adaptability."

https://t.co/kI747kyH5O

Thank you @santiyer, for this opportunity, we will make this a global success🙏

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Post from Santosh Iyer, Managing Director of Mercedes-Benz India:

"Today, we proudly introduce ‘SKYLine’, our next-generation Dealer Management System, ‘Made in India, for India’, co-created with Zoho, underlining the unmatched prowess of Indian technological innovation, having international adaptability."

https://t.co/kI747kyH5O

Thank you @santiyer, for this opportunity, we will make this a global success🙏

[Raju Vegesna @rajuv]

We’re thrilled to partner with Mercedes-Benz India to launch a decentralized dealer management system.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

By now, I hope it is clear to all of India's educated elite that we must build up our capabilities here. The mindset "we can buy whatever we lack" or its much deeper axiomatic version "money can buy everything" won't work in this new era. For one, money cannot buy national security nor sovereignty nor resilience. We cannot stand up to bullies if we don't build ourselves up.

More broadly, educated Indians must reexamine our fundamental belief systems. As one example, why are we paying so much for a degree from abroad (and here I am not referring to the low cost medical education in Vietnam - we must examine why medical education is so costly in India!)

Second, should we still value English as the _medium of instruction_? We should learn English _as a language_ but does it make sense to make it the medium for teaching mathematics or history or technology or medicine? English as the medium of instruction is a status symbol from our colonial past. Should that be our future as well?

Why I repeatedly come back to this question is because language has separated us into two classes and that division has only grown worse. English as a status symbol is a bigger barrier today than caste. I know how deeply it is holding back our rural youth.

The solution "government schools offer English medium to everyone" does not work and has never worked. Instead I propose that all our children - rich and poor - must be educated in our own languages as it happens in countries big and small and as it happens in all of the nations of EU.

Yes that means that every kid in Bengaluru must study in Kannada (not just learn Kannada!) and in Chennai must study in Tamil. Countries like the Netherlands with a quarter of the population of Tamil Nadu make it mandatory to learn in Dutch only after a year of enrolling in school there. Children do learn quickly.

So before you react emotionally to my suggestion "how dare you suggest my English fluent children study in Tamil or Kannada medium" ask yourself if that has served our nation well. Are we bringing up our children to have no pride or attachment towards India, particularly the vast majority of our people who do not speak English? Are we not alienating our own children from our roots?

Please don't bring up "IT jobs". We build sophisticated tools like compilers and the team mostly speaks Tamil. We never made it a requirement to be fluent in English and our engineers learn enough English to read English documentation, just as engineers in Japan and China and Korea and Germany all do.

And we do have a lot of non-Tamil speaking engineers too and since they choose to live in Tamil Nadu they learn enough Tamil to work with colleagues. This is what Indians learn to do when we migrate to, say, Germany. It is not the big deal we often make it out to be.

So we must stop making excuses. It starts with our mental attitudes towards our nation and our fellow citizens.

[Zoho @Zoho]

We're thrilled to partner with @Joyalukkas in their digital transformation journey. Using Zoho's CX platform, they've enhanced their global retail experiences by unifying sales and service across 175 showrooms in 11 countries. #ZohoforEnterprise

Read on 👉 https://t.co/GGIlhtG315

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

@IndianTechGuide The sales guy who led this deal should be off to a good 6 month vacation 😁

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

@ankitatIIMA @grok Fact check with the most latest update

[Harshendu @Harshendu_]

@chandsitara12 Thanks community notes 😊