Video Interview for Zoho by Jason English
Udit Pahwa, CIO of Blue Star Limited, sits down with Intellyx analyst Jason English at #ZohoDay25, to discuss how this large multinational enterprise builds scalable apps with ease for their associates and customers on the Zoho One platform using Zoho CRM, low-code (Zoho Creator) builders, ManageEngine for ITSM and secure operations, and the Zia AI assistant.
Read the Intellyx case study blog about Blue Star’s digital transformation with Zoho here: https://intellyx.com/2025/03/04/building-new-capacity-with-zoho-creators-low-code-agility-at-blue-star/
Watch the interview video below or visit our YouTube page at: https://youtu.be/WGXZyfEudpo
Full transcript of the interview:
JE: All right. We’re here at ZohoDay25, probably one of my favorite analyst shows ever, because we not only get to hear from Zoho about all their new innovations, but we get to talk to customers about what they’re actually doing with the application suite. So I have today with me Udit Pahwa, who’s the chief information officer at Blue Star.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you do at Blue Star, what the company does?
Udit: Yes. Blue Star is one of the leading air conditioning solution providers for India. We are 84-year-young organization in this business. So besides commercial air conditioning, we also have solutions for retail, which is room air conditioning for users.
And my role as the CIO there spans across infrastructure, cybersecurity, business applications, data analytics and digital.
JE: Excellent. So I know that you’re really operating applications on a very large scale. Most people, when they talk about low-code solutions, they don’t think that they’re ready for that kind of scale.
How have you approached that challenge?
Udit: I’ve been using low-code frameworks and applications for a good eight years now. And your observation is correct. Initially, they were not scalable beyond a certain limit in terms of the users. They would tend to go slow or crash.
I think the modern age, especially in the last three years with the newer versions coming out we have users to the tune of 2,000 to 3,000 users on a single application.
And it scales beautifully, and it does not offer any kind of a performance issue.
JE: Hmm. How did you discover Zoho? How did you start your journey with them? Was it already in place, or?
Udit: Yeah, so our journey started with Zoho CRM for the presales process. And we started with one small business function in one business division.
So we have about five business divisions. And what started in one small function and division slowly grew. Today, to 100 percent of our presales across all businesses and divisions and locations run Zoho CRM. Along the way, we started our journey with Zoho Creator which was at about, I think 2000, just about three years ago.
And that became the platform of choice. And the strategy and approach is to start subsuming all the different point solutions that we are running into Zoho. So we craft cross-platform them and bring them into the single development platform. Besides that, we are also now invested in ManageEngine.
We are in the process of rolling out ManageEngine. We’re using Zoho Vault for password security at the admin level.
JE: Yeah, pretty much using a lot of the suites functionality right now. So you had to sunset a lot of existing tools that you had in place or how difficult was that?
Udit: Both yes and no. In terms of difficulty was, you know, re-skilling the team members who were managing with the prior tools to Zoho.
But it was not so much of a challenge because there’s enough collateral available on the web. And Zoho team themselves have been very supportive in, offering awareness sessions, training sessions, etc. to the teams whenever we’ve demanded them. So that was the part which we were able to take over seamlessly while transitioning from one platform and system to Creator.
The other part which was tough, was that whenever you transition or cross platform, it’s taken up as an opportunity by either the user or the IT to add some value, improve, etc. So that proved to be a bit of a bother where we had some application which was having, let’s say, 10 features and then when we’re bringing it into Creator, suddenly there is a demand to scale it up to 25 features.
So the time taken for us, if I had to do 10 to 10, it would have been quick, but now I have to scale it up to 25. So it involved redesigning the architecture. So it was like doing something from the ground up to scale up, but it was fun.
JE: Yeah, that’s, that is always very difficult when people start changing the scope as you get into the project already.
And that’s certainly what you had to deal with. And then on the adoption side, how did you deal with some of the challenges there as far as getting so many people in so many different offices to adopt your network as well? Yes.
Udit: Yes, so for adoption, I think about a two-pronged approach.
One is getting executive support. So as I mentioned, we started with one business division and the head of that business division who owns the P&L was himself very digitally savvy. He said, “I have a vision not to work on spreadsheets every day in the morning when I get up. I should open my mobile app to see where I stand, where my team stands, where the organization stands.”
And we used his hunger for his vision to drive adoption in his team. And when his team adopted now, while the vision from the leader is fine, but when it trickles down right to the foot soldier, you know, you have to answer the question, what is in it for me? Generally, CRM is seen as a moral policing tool by the users and that’s why the adoption fails.
The way we handled it was we told the sales team what is in it for them, how this is going to benefit them, how this is going to add to their productivity and make them more resourceful. I think that this two-pronged approach of answering what is in it for me, and having executive support, has helped us achieve 100 percent adoptability of the CRM in our sales team.
JE: Yeah, excellent. And then as far as ManageEngine, you know, we’ve been following them for a number of years, but it’s, what do you think about how they’ve sort of embedded it into the overall Zoho suite now, and is that going to help you going forward?
Udit: So it’s early for me to comment because as we speak, we are in the process of implementing it.
We only signed up in January for ManageEngine but when we did a competitive benchmarking,we looked at a host of other tools which are available, not all of them, but probably the top five. We found that the ease of integration of Manage Engine with all the other existing tools, specifically for us, was more amiable than any other tool that we were evaluating. That’s point number one.
Point number two, since we already have Creator deeply rooted into our ecosystem, we found that it’s a very natural congregation of both Manage Engine coming in with Creator and we can use the Creator to extend over Manage Engine as well.
So that’s the plan we have to use it going forward.
JE: Have you been looking at any of the Zia or the AI-enabled functionality in the Zoho Suite?
Udit: Yes, yes. Last quarter I had a meeting with the product management team where they gave us an overview of Zia for Creator. So this quarter or other maybe March we are gonna have a dedicated crack team in, in part of my team.
It’s going to focus on how we can leverage Zia going forward because we have a huge pipeline of applications that we need to build on the Creator platform. So we are now looking at Zia to fast-track that development and probably get more value for the time that we’re investing on the Creator platform.
JE: Yeah, sounds like a good story. Well, it’s been great talking to you and I think that’s all the questions I had. Do you have any other final thoughts?
Udit: Final thoughts? Yes. I think I’ve been here yesterday and since morning I’ve had discussions with a lot of product reps from Zoho and I found out that they have expense management as travel and expense management, which has built in integrations with a couple of travel portals.
We have subscribed to one of the travel portals, but I never knew that that travel portal has an integration with Zoho Expense. So that’s one area. Another area, a takeaway for me to start looking at all these products that I’ve, you know, today we saw 55 plus applications. So I think I have my hands full on looking at what are the other options and subscriptions that we can do on the Zoho entire ecosystem.
JE: Great. Yeah, we’re users of Expense too, so it’s interesting. Good. Well, this has been a really productive. Thank you. Thanks for the interview and stay tuned for more excellent content from ZohoDay25. I’m Jason English principal analyst at Intellyx.
Udit: Thank you. Udit Pahwa, signing off from Blue Star.
Thank you.
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