Zoho co-founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu has shared insights into the advanced technology behind Arattai, Zoho’s indigenous messaging and calling platform, highlighting the years of research and deep engineering that power it.
In an X post dated October 5, 2025, Vembu described Arattai as a seemingly simple product that’s actually built upon extensive engineering frameworks developed in-house at Zoho.
He explained that Arattai’s real-time communication features are supported by Zoho’s custom messaging and audio-visual (AV) framework, fine-tuned over 15 years to deliver clear, quick, and reliable calls and meetings. Complementing this is Zoho’s distributed computing framework, honed over two decades, which efficiently manages server workloads, ensures fault tolerance, performance tracking, and maintains robust data security — the same backbone that supports Zoho’s entire cloud ecosystem.
Arattai is on the surface a simple product but it has a lot of depth inside.
Let me list the engineering frameworks (all homegrown) that power Arattai.
First is what we call our messaging/AV framework. This has been the “real time” workhorse of Zoho for a while and this is…
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) October 4, 2025
Vembu emphasized that Zoho’s long-term success stems from its commitment to in-depth R&D, noting that he now focuses entirely on research and innovation, with more technological breakthroughs expected soon.
He also commended the Arattai development team for their five-plus years of perseverance, likening the discipline required in engineering to spiritual devotion, and encouraged them to stay dedicated to their mission, undeterred by external validation.
