Interview at the Zoholics’24 event in Austin, TX
In this installment of the Zoholics’24 video series, Intellyx Managing Director Jason Bloomberg interviews Tejas Gadhia, Lead Developer Experience Evangelist for Zoho, on the latest features in Catalyst, Zoho’s ‘pro-code’ development tool, as well as Apptics, Zoho’s lightweight application analytics tool.
Show links:
- Zoho Catalyst: https://catalyst.zoho.com/
- Zoho Apptics: https://www.zoho.com/apptics/
- Watch the video on the Intellyx YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/NxSP-Uonps8
Read the full transcript on the Intellyx blog below.
Transcript:
Jason: Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg. I’m Managing Director of Intellyx. And with me is Tejas Gadhia, Evangelist at Zoho. And this morning, we’ll be talking a bit about Catalyst. So Tejas, why don’t you tell us, just give us a big picture. What is Catalyst, and how does it fit into the Zoho product line?
Tejas: Yeah, good question. So, Catalyst is a serverless platform.
Basically, the infrastructure that all the Zoho products run on is an internal version of Catalyst, and we’ve decided to expose it similar to like an AWS model. And it’s really important for us because we really think that beyond all the point products we make, there’s always some developer extensibility or custom solutions that need to be built.
And there’s no better place to have deep integrations with the point products we make, as well as just leveraging the infrastructure we have around the world already for developers to build their own solutions on.
Jason: Okay, and there’s some news this week about Catalyst. So what’s brand new with Catalyst these days?
Tejas: Yeah, so we came out with I think about six or eight new services as we call them in Catalyst. A couple of the big ones — one is called Signals. So it’s kind of like an event driven architecture for receiving any kind of action that happens in this whole world of third party services. It doesn’t consume API calls.
It just basically ties directly into the framework, so you get real time updates and just faster processing of actions based on some trigger. Another big one is CI/CD pipelines. Big missing piece. Not super innovative, I’d say, but for obviously any custom solution built in Catalyst, you need to be able to test and deploy it.
So having that built in rather than relying on a third-party framework or like a Jenkins or something else, it’s all baked in house. And the goal, it’s really impossible to stay up to par with, let’s say, the big players in terms of every service offering by their cloud infrastructure.
But we try to focus on what is probably 80 percent of people really need. And maybe that last 20 percent chain of certain types of databases or certain types of functionalities. If it has like minimal usage or not, you know, really that core, we might not focus on those, but the big pieces that people need to build, usually business solutions that tie into their existing business apps we want to make sure we have all those things there.
Jason: So you mentioned CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and when I think of CI/CD, I think of a tool chain of multiple tools connected together. For better or worse, sometimes it’s a difficult integration challenge. But you mentioned that instead of tools like Jenkins, you’re going to be able to use Catalyst.
So, do you really see organizations using only Catalyst, or is it really a question of using Catalyst in conjunction with other tools?
Tejas: We always try to I guess, be operable either way. So, as much as we’d love people to be in this whole world, in the Catalyst world we understand that you might have other requirements, and so there’s always an open integration otherwise.
And the CI/CD pipeline that we have right now is kind of like the first step. Obviously, we’ll have our own code repository with versioning and everything coming out soon. We have testing automation as well for web and unit testing. And so, between all these different pieces. We’re trying to put all the puzzle pieces together and provide an end-to-end solution to make things easier.
We hope that the integrated solution makes time to market and the DevOps side that nobody really enjoys faster and easier for people. But if they want to use other tools, we’re always going to integrate with others as well.
Jason: I also see that there’s a new NoSQL database that’s part of Catalyst. So tell us a bit about that.
Tejas: Yeah, this is also a heavily requested feature by most people. By default we had a normal relational database, but I think really just the rise of the type of data that people are consuming nowadays. It’s just become more and more popular. I think Dynamo DB is like one of the more popular AWS services, for example.
So we knew it was a missing piece, and I would say, not the most technically easy way to actually implement and offer it at scale, but the team was able to put it together. And I think it’s gonna make a big change in just really capturing all sorts of I don’t use word signals, because that’s the feature of the other thing, but just pieces of input that comes all over the place.
And then that tag tied in with the existing like AI/ML functionality that’s built into Catalyst will let people leverage it a lot better.
Jason: So it’s still trying to understand how people are going to use the noSQL database as opposed to, I guess you have a regular relational capability that was already part of the product.
So how do you think people are going to use that? I mean, what’s it, what’s it really for in practice?
Tejas: Yeah, so usually, I mean, obviously it’s meant for like unstructured data. So if we’re just getting a bunch of pieces of information, it’s not really structured in any way, shape or form. But maybe we need to run some kind of like analysis on it.
Maybe we want to use it for any kind of prediction models or maybe even lead scoring or something simple in one of the products. It’s just the repo for it all. So I’d say that people, they ask for it. I guess the use cases are really endless, but people keep asking for it, so we keep giving it to them.
Jason: I see. So for unstructured data, it’s like text based data, emails, whatever it is. And that’s also very important for AI models as well. So what’s the tie in with AI there?
Tejas: Yeah. By default we have our own AI models that we provide. So like Zia offers or makes our own AI models that we build from the ground up.
And then we also connect with third party services, like your Anthropic or your OpenAI or whatever. So people can choose whatever model they want to train on. Our models are a lot more specialized. We offer a lot of these like what we call business service models. It’s AI-infused, like OCR highly focused on certain functionalities or maybe it’s some kind of prediction analysis based on a highly specialized thing.
And a lot of our models, generally the people that build solutions on ours, we’re not talking millions, tens of millions of like data points to train on. It might be in the thousands or tens of thousands. And so we try to like hone in our models on what we kind of put into buckets of like a, a small model, a medium model, and a large model.
And the training is impacted, but we try to really make it valuable for, I would say, more simple applications, while everybody’s kind of focused on like the larger abstract one. So that’s kind of what we try to focus on. Obviously it works better in large ones, but if you have a small data set to train on and you don’t get good results, you’re not really happy.
Jason: So trying to democratize that a little bit lower down. Very good. Well, let’s switch the conversation a bit to Apptics. So tell us a bit about Apptics sort of give us the big picture. What is it and how does it fit into the Zoho story?
Tejas: Apptics is like a native application monitoring and management, I would call it.
We’ve used it internally at Zoho for the better part of probably four, five years, give or take. And it does big things for both developers as well as marketers. So on the developer side, you’d get things like usage, analytics, crash test public pushing updates and stuff like that. For marketers, you can do things like push notifications and store updates and What you call running promotions and things along those lines.
So it’s meant to be an end-to-end native application monitoring tool. And it’s used by every single product that we put in the marketplace currently from our CRM to creator to whatever. They’re all baked in there, and it’s a generally an easy way, because most of these kinds of analytics tools they can be a little on the spyware kind of side.
There’s a lot of in-house development happening. You’re tracking a lot of user data, and if you really have to trust the company. So I really think that having some sense of differentiation there. Okay — Being a trustworthy brand on privacy and also being able to provide analytics will make people feel a little bit safer about trusting us with their analytics tool rather than some third-party service that might be sharing their data or something.
Jason: Okay, so yeah, let’s drill down a bit on that. So, on the one hand, an analytics tool, especially for a marketer, say, who’s looking at you know, deep information about how customers or prospects are behaving. On the one hand, if a prospect is interacting, say, with a website or an app that, that uses expecting the company to, to get information about them.
But on the other hand, you’re trying to provide a level of privacy. So how do you help draw that line? I mean, how do you protect users, but also give the marketers the information they need?
Tejas: Yeah. So whenever the user configures something in Apptics, basically they have the option to provide like a custom prompt that they put in the app — and it’s basically, do you want to share your usage analytics anonymously or you’re all in with an email address or maybe anonymized by my ID, but not really fully anonymous to give people granular levels of how much exposure. We kind of feel that the user should be able to control that rather than the developer.
Developer has an option, but we encourage people to let the user decide what they want to do and make sure that it’s still actionable at the end of the day for developers. So regardless of whether it’s anonymized or not, still can you get a macro view of what’s going on and can you identify trends and there’s something baked in there too for just really keeping track of issues that might arise before you might actually notice them.
To help people ahead of problems.
Jason: So that user empowerment is sort of the key there. At least giving your customers, the businesses using the software, the ability to empower their users. Exactly. And they don’t necessarily, necessarily follow the rules that way, and they may retain some capabilities that the developers can implement, but at least the capabilities are there.
Tejas: The option is there, yeah. I mean, ultimately, we have our stance on privacy. Everybody has their own stance on different business models requiring different levels of data collection and stuff like that. Totally understandable. But as long as the options are given, hopefully they leverage them to build trust with their users.
Jason: That’s great. If not, they can do what they want to do. Yeah, very good. So what’s new with Apptics this week?
Tejas: Well, the whole product. I mean, we’ve been using internally for about 4 or 5 years, but we finally want to bring it out for everybody else. That’s kind of how we do with most things similar to the Catalyst world where so products are built on like an internal version of catalyst and then we exposed it.
All these old products we’re using an internal version of Apptics for the past couple of years. And finally, like, pack, package it up as a product and then push it out for people to use. So the whole piece of product is basically new, I guess.
Jason: Oh, very good. So it’s, it’s generally available?
Tejas: Generally available, yeah.
Jason: This week? Very good. So, anybody can come, or any, I guess, one customer gets it automatically, right?
Tejas: Yeah. And anybody else can come and sign up. But it’s really not a standalone product per se, right? It’s going to work with conjunction with others. Our whole products, right? Yeah, so it’s already tied in with the Catalyst solution to build a native app or a web or mobile app and Catalyst and Apptics will be baked in there in Creator.
If you make a low code application Apptics is baked in there and the depth of the Apptics usage might not be there. So, for example, if I go back to Creator and low code that might not be. The all the developer tweaks that somebody might need, but it might be more around marketing and like crash and like if our like user patterns and flows and that might be the most important thing to like a low code developer.
They might not get into the weeds where is it failing or their API calls being busted or things like that. And so we try to provide like levels of abstraction based on the tool that people are using, but definitely baked into every product that people are building.
Jason: Very good. So is there anything else that you wanted to cover today?
Tejas: Maybe going back to the main part. No, there’s no perfect developer platform as a whole. We’ve got a bunch of different pieces from like low code stuff to pro code stuff with catalyst and Apptics and testing automation and transactional email services. So there’s a bunch of different services and kind of the developer bubble that we have.
And we really think that having the developer suite sit next to the business product suite and deeply integrated will increase like developer productivity over time. I think going forward, obviously, AI being a big concern for a lot of people. So the deeper the integration that we can provide and the easier it can be for people, that’ll make them just find value a lot quicker and not have to deal with integration limits or documentation or any kind of things.
There will be a lot of this will be generated over time, but if we can provide unique native integrations, that’ll be a big X factor.
Jason: Very good. Well, I think that’s it. So, thanks to Tejas Gadhia from Zoho and I’m Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx.
Tejas: Thank you very much.
Watch the whole video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/NxSP-Uonps8
©2024, Intellyx B.V. Intellyx retains editorial control over this story. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber.
