- Zoho's global headquarters is in Chennai and pays taxes in India on worldwide income, said Sridhar Vembu
- Indian customer data is hosted in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, with expansion planned in Odisha, he said
- Zoho runs services on company-owned hardware using open-source software, not on AWS or Azure, he added.
Zoho has dismissed misconceptions about its data hosting, development practices and global operations. Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho Corp, set the record straight on several key points in a detailed social media post.
All Zoho products are made in the country, and the business pays taxes on its worldwide revenue in India, he said.
“There are questions about where Zoho is developed and where the data is hosted, and who hosts it. There is a lot of false information we want to correct. Our global headquarters is in Chennai, and we pay taxes in India on our global income. As a global corporation headquartered in India, we have offices in over 80 countries and have a strong presence in the US, which is a big market for us,” Mr Vembu wrote.
Indian customer data is hosted in the country, specifically in Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai, with plans to expand to Odisha soon, he added. Zoho operates more than 18 data centres worldwide, each hosting respective country or regional data, ensuring compliance with local jurisdiction requirements, Mr Vembu said.
All Zoho services are run on company-owned hardware and software frameworks developed internally using open-source platforms such as the Linux operating system and the Postgres database, he said. It does not host its products on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, he added in his post.
Mr Vembu also took the opportunity to dispel the misinformation swirling around the company's messaging app Arattai. "Arattai, specifically, is not hosted on AWS or Azure or GCloud," he said.
Mr Vembu explained that although some public cloud services utilise switching nodes to speed up regional traffic, no customer data is stored in them.
“We are adding many such 'points of presence' (POPs) as we speak,” he wrote. He mentioned that the developer account in the App Store and Play Store lists a US address, as it was registered in the early days of these platforms, created by a US-based employee for testing purposes and was never updated.
Mr Vembu concluded his post by highlighting Zoho's dedication to being "Made in India, Made for the World."
Home-grown messaging app Arattai, developed by Zoho, has also been in the headlines. Launched in 2021, the app is experiencing a record-breaking surge in daily sign-ups, jumping 100-fold from 3,000 to 350,000 in just three days in late September.
This growth briefly pushed the app to the top of India's app store charts, surpassing WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
