With the addition of a new serverless developer platform, Catalyst, Zoho CRM continues to drive the operating system for business ahead of the market.
Catalyst is a full-stack development platform that helps programmers and developers to speed up their development process by utilizing Zoho’s services, tools, and frameworks, without thinking about the underlying infrastructure required for building world-class mobile apps, AI solutions, event-driven actions, microservices, serverless apps, and CI/CD pipelines.
Till now, Catalyst has been used to build an app to import users into a CRM, a data cleansing app, and microservice for lead generation.
Developing Applications with Zoho Catalyst
Build Faster: Developers will get mobile SDKs and APIs to build serverless applications faster. Catalyst boasts powerful command-line tools that let your developers build, test, and deploy any app easily in no time.
Complexity Simplified: App development has a lot of complexity. You can simplify those by testing each and everything through multiple sandbox environments before taking the app to production. Catalyst removes hosting and distribution issues as well. You can host your web applications within Catalyst and manage distribution using built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM).
Low Code, Less to Worry: Choose your programming language – Java, Node.js, and Python and Zoho’s relational datastore to quickly create functions from the comfort of your CLI or your favorite code editor. With Zoho’s catalyst, you won’t have to worry about server and database maintenance or repetitive coding. Leave the maintenance and other complexities to Zoho.
Save time and money: Develop apps and services smarter, not harder. You can build your apps using the ready-made components available with Zoho, customize the functional server-side components and integrate everything seamlessly into your microservices. This is a cost-effective and faster development process, thus saving your developers valuable time and your budget. Plus, Zoho’s Catalyst will be priced aggressively based on a pay-per-trigger model. You will be charged only for the time taken by your functions to execute and the components Catalyst API call.
Working With Catalyst – Zoho CRM Platform’s New Addition
Catalyst BaaS (Backend as a Service): You get access to server-side components and pre-written templates from one interface. Zoho Catalyst takes care of hosting, database, testing, analytics, cloud storage, integration and more, while you focus on improving the user experience by modifying the programmable elements from the CLI in your terminal. Zoho Catalyst provides the following BaaS services:
| Development | Computation | Amplification |
| User Management | Functions | Search Integration |
| Data Store | App Logic | |
| Cache | Security Rules | Push Notifications |
| Cron | GitHub Integration | |
| Event Listeners | Zia OCR and Object Recognition | |
| File Store | ||
| Data Querying | Hosting and Management | Monitoring |
| ZCQL | Web Client Hosting | Logs |
| Device management | Metrics | |
| Domain mapping | Crashes |
Catalyst FaaS (Functions as a Service): Catalyst offers Cloud Functions that contain intensive business logic. These functions are stored in one secured place. Developers can use APIs and libraries to call these functions when required. Catalyst provides server-side functions in Java and Node.js programming environments. These server-side functions can be accessed dynamically at any time. And these functions can be deployed easily with a single command. These functions minimize developers’ work by automating reusable behaviors. They can also execute background processes automatically.
Zoho handles server maintenance, allocation, and other tasks. Catalyst helps you scale up and down the computational resources as and when required.
Catalyst Tools: Catalysts offers a number of reliable, cloud-based, and scalable tools like Web SDK tools, web client hosting, Content Delivery Network, and more. Catalyst Device Management, designed on the basis of ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus, enables you to host, manage and distribute your Android and iOS apps. This device management capability by Catalyst also lets you integrate Crashes in your mobile apps to enable you to monitor crashes from the Catalyst console. You can even incorporate Push Notifications to send notifications from the console.
Zoho has developed its own MySQL type query language called ZCQL. You can use ZCQL in Zoho Catalyst to perform data manipulations in the Catalyst Data Store. Other things you can do with ZCQL are executing queries before implementing them, performing arithmetic and numeric operations, retrieving data from the store, and passing a query on the API’s body.
The Metrics tool gives you usage information about various components you require for a development project in Zoho Catalyst. You get to view Data Store, Cache, Queue, Cron, Files, and API in the form of pie charts and graphs for tracking usage in real-time.
Catalyst also comes with an AI-powered API Kit, which can help you detect anomalies, scan barcodes, detect text from image files, and much more. It also provides OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and objects detection through Zia.
Zoho Catalyst will soon feature grammar and diction checking (powered by Zoho Writer) and document previews (powered by Zoho Docs). Zoho will unveil more microservices for Catalyst in the coming months.
The Operating System for Business
Zoho CRM Platform has launched 45+ apps over the last 15 years and these apps serve more than 45 million businesses across the globe. Zoho has built the entire tech stack from its own servers and data house. They have even built their own authentication, machine learning, emailing, and push notifications systems.
Zoho’s Catalyst can be a catalyst for your growth because you can build and deploy your app or service without thinking about infrastructure, security, maintenance, and hosting. You will have to do less coding and less repetitive tasks, thus helping you to devote more time to business logic. Using this serverless developer platform, you can build custom web and mobile apps, REST APIs, data processing pipelines, and run scheduled jobs at different intervals.
Catalyst helps you to deploy applications and scale them automatically. Plus, you will never have to worry about the security of your applications as they are hosted and maintained on the secured infrastructure of Zoho that has been built and optimized over the last 15 years.
Fortunately, Zoho’s existing applications will more than fit the needs of most organizations. Using Zoho Creator, a business process tool that is included with Zoho One, we can build functionality and an interface that even goes beyond that. But when a business has very unique and exacting requirements, the Zoho Catalyst Platform provides Authorized Partner’s such as First Direct Corporation, independent developers and system integrators proven system for building and hosting an entirely custom system.
Contact First Direct Corp., a Zoho Authorized Partner, if you want to learn more about the Zoho CRM Platform and its new tool – Catalyst.
