Zoho’s Hyther Nizam on Data Centres, AI, and Why Businesses Are Choosing Zoho Over Microsoft in the UAE

Zoho has been on a quiet tear across the Middle East. While the headlines tend to go to Microsoft and Google when it comes to enterprise cloud adoption in the region, the Chennai-headquartered company has been steadily building something that's hard to ignore: 38.7% revenue growth in the UAE in 2025, a 48% jump in enterprise customers, a partner network that's expanded fourfold, and — as of January 2026 — its own data centres in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

That last point matters more than it might seem. The data centres are part of an AED 100 million investment that Zoho committed to back in 2023, and they represent a bet that data sovereignty, local compliance, and on-shore infrastructure are becoming dealbreakers for businesses and government entities across the UAE.

We sat down with Hyther Nizam, President of Zoho Middle East and Africa, to talk about what it actually takes to build data infrastructure in the UAE, why businesses are migrating from Microsoft and Google to Zoho, and where AI fits into the picture.

Building data infrastructure in the UAE isn’t just about spending money

When Zoho announced its UAE data centres, the easy assumption was that this was primarily a capital expenditure play — write a big cheque, rack some servers, and tick the data sovereignty box. Nizam says the reality was considerably more complicated.

“The bigger complexity lies in how the data centre is designed, operated, and governed on an ongoing basis. Unlike many SaaS providers, we run our own infrastructure stack.”

Zoho now operates 20 data centres globally, and the UAE facilities follow a similar model: the company works with local colocation providers for physical rack space, power, and cooling, but retains full ownership of everything from server architecture and deployment to maintenance and provisioning. That operational control is deliberate — it’s how Zoho maintains oversight of performance, security, and customer data without relying on third parties.

The bigger challenge, according to Nizam, was regulatory compliance. Securing certification from the Dubai Electronic Security Center (DESC) required architectural changes at the product level, not just infrastructure adjustments. Certain integrations had to be rerouted to local providers — local SMS gateways like Etisalat instead of global messaging aggregators, and locally approved mapping services rather than international defaults.

The result is that Zoho’s UAE data centres now carry DESC certification, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 27017, and CSA STAR Level 2 compliance — which, critically, qualifies Zoho to serve government and semi-government entities in addition to private sector businesses.

The enterprise shift nobody expected

Zoho has long been known as the secondary, affordable option for SMBs. But the numbers from the UAE tell a different story. A 48% increase in enterprise adoption in 2025 suggests that larger organisations are taking Zoho seriously — and Nizam attributes this to a combination of platform flexibility and local engagement.

The pitch to enterprises, as Nizam frames it, is about the total cost of ownership and deployment speed. Zoho's products can be customised using built-in no-code and low-code capabilities, and they integrate into existing technology stacks rather than demanding a wholesale rip-and-replace. For CIOs evaluating modernisation paths, that's an increasingly attractive proposition.

“Enterprises are looking for solutions that can give them faster time to market and agility to adapt to changing market conditions, while bringing down the total cost of ownership of their tech stack.”

The local presence angle also matters. Zoho now has six offices across the MENA region, and Nizam emphasises that enterprise customers get end-to-end engagement from the local team — presales, solution selling, onboarding, consultancy, and ongoing support. Over the past five years, Zoho has invested AED 80 million to enable more than 7,000 businesses through partnerships with entities such as the Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) and Dubai Culture.

The Microsoft and Google question

It's the question every Zoho executive gets asked, and Nizam doesn't dodge it. When pressed on why a UAE CIO would choose Zoho over Microsoft 365 with Copilot or Google Workspace with Gemini, his answer is nuanced: Zoho doesn't always replace them. It often coexists alongside them.

With over 55 products spanning CRM, finance, HR, project management, and more, Zoho's competitive footprint extends beyond productivity suites. Zoho Workplace competes directly with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, but Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, and Zoho Creator operate in spaces where those platforms have weaker or nonexistent offerings. The argument is that an organisation can run Microsoft for email and Office apps while using Zoho for everything else — and the data flows between them.

But when businesses do choose Zoho Workplace outright? Nizam points to migration numbers that are hard to dismiss: globally, Zoho saw a 50% increase in migrations from Microsoft and a 35% increase from Google in 2025. Stable pricing, a single-platform approach, and Zoho's privacy stance are cited as the drivers.

“Businesses in the UAE and other countries across the globe are already choosing Zoho Workplace for its stable pricing, greater capabilities available on a single platform, as well as Zoho’s privacy stance.”

Addressing the support problem

We put the support question to Nizam directly. Across platforms like Reddit, Trustpilot, and Gartner Peer Insights, customer support is one of the most common complaints about Zoho — slow response times, front-line agents struggling with complex setups, and premium support tiers that carry additional costs.

Nizam acknowledges that support experiences can vary, particularly given the scale of serving over 130 million users globally. His response centres on what Zoho has done specifically in the region: expanding local offices across MENA, more than doubling the local workforce with technically skilled staff, and growing the partner ecosystem fourfold to provide additional channels for enterprise support and customisation.

It's a fair answer, though it doesn't entirely address the global complaints. The regional investment is tangible — UAE-based businesses likely get a different support experience than a small business on the other side of the world — but it's clear this remains a work in progress for Zoho at scale.

AI: modest by design, not by accident

Independent analysts have described Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, as “more modest” than Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini. With both competitors investing tens of billions in agentic, multi-step AI capabilities embedded across their ecosystems, the gap — at least in headline features — appears significant.

Nizam's response is that the modesty is intentional. Zoho's AI strategy rests on three principles: right-sizing models (Zoho released 1.3 billion-parameter models purpose-built for its ecosystem rather than chasing ever-larger LLMs), training models specifically on business problems to reduce compute requirements, and embedding privacy from the design stage by never using customer data to train models.

“Our AI often operates silently in the background — customers may not even realise a process is AI-powered, yet they achieve better outcomes without worrying about extra costs or data privacy risks.”

The practical differentiator, Nizam argues, is that Zoho's AI capabilities come at no additional cost — a pointed contrast to Microsoft's Copilot, which requires a separate per-user subscription on top of existing Microsoft 365 licences. And because Zoho's architecture allows data to flow across all its apps, the AI outputs benefit from cross-functional context rather than operating in silos.

Zoho's recognition as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM lends some credibility to this approach. And the recent launch of Zia Hubs — which allows businesses to extract intelligence from unstructured content such as PDFs, call logs, emails, and meeting recordings via natural language queries — suggests the company is investing in practical AI tooling rather than flashy demonstrations.

Data sovereignty is more than a data centre address

We challenged Nizam on the data sovereignty narrative. Microsoft Azure already has a region in the UAE. AWS has Middle East infrastructure. If a business is already hosted locally with one of those providers, what does Zoho's data centre actually add?

His answer reframes the question. Data sovereignty, he argues, isn't just about where data physically sits — it's about the governance framework around it. Zoho is fully bootstrapped with no external investors, builds and runs its entire technology stack in-house, and has no ad-revenue model. There are no third-party vendors in the chain who could be compromised.

When pressed on why Zoho hasn't published a formal transparency report — something both Microsoft and Google do — Nizam points to Zoho’s compliance certifications (GDPR, POPIA, HIPAA, and the recently obtained DESC certification) as tangible evidence, and notes that several competitors with transparency reports have also been penalised for privacy violations.

“For us, privacy is an ethical matter, and our stance of not selling customer data predates any legal mandates imposed by any country.”

Looking ahead to 2030

Asked for a single prediction about business technology in the Middle East by the end of the decade, Nizam's answer avoids the usual platitudes about AI replacing jobs.

“It won’t be a future where AI replaces people. It will be one where people who effectively work with AI replace those who don’t.”

His vision is one of deep human-AI collaboration — AI advisors, coaches, and co-pilots that actively train alongside their users, guiding decision-making and helping organisations integrate AI in ways that generate measurable ROI rather than just operational novelty.

Whether Zoho can deliver on that vision while competing against two of the most well-resourced technology companies on the planet remains to be seen. But with local data centres operational, enterprise adoption accelerating, and a privacy-first model that resonates in a region increasingly concerned about data sovereignty, the company has positioned itself as something more than just the affordable alternative. The question now is whether that momentum translates into lasting market share — or whether Microsoft and Google's AI investments eventually make the gap too wide to bridge.

Disclosure: This article is based on written responses provided by Zoho Corporation to questions submitted by tbreak Media. The questions were developed independently by our editorial team.

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