thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz

The New Enterprise Moat? Zoho’s AppOS and Stack Sovereignty Signal the End of Fragmented SaaS

by | Feb 23, 2026 | Blog |

ZohoDay 2026 is in the books, and it has again been an intense two days of information and discussions, starting off with some impressive statistics. In time for its 30th anniversary, Zoho crossed the milestones of one million paying customers and an eye watering 150 million users. All this while not having raised a single dollar of external capital or buying technology or users. The company stays fiercely independent and continues to grow very profitably since it crossed the threshold of an annual revenue of $1bn back in November 2022. If I wanted to boil this event down to a few key messages, it would be value, independence, platform, and, of course, AI.  The conference in a nutshell: Value is the result of the smart use of automation with AI that works on top of the corporate system of record, powered by a platform that is built on an independently owned stack. This is also the secret sauce of Zoho, a philosophy that the company follows since its inception.  And here is how Zoho brings this to work.  Zoho owns and continuously improves its stack Coming from the angle of sovereignty, Zoho extends this thought of independence to its customers now in an answer to Raju Vegesna’s not so rhetoric question “what will happen if someone can pull the plug?” on any of your essential systems. All of the sudden, the thought of local deployments or hybrid deployments with cloud apps operating on local data becomes very interesting, valuable, again. It is mitigating risk. According to Vegesna, clients of different sizes are asking for this model. Another part of this equation is...