Arattai's engineering has 'lot of depth': Zoho's Sridhar Vembu

New Delhi, Oct 5 (IANS) Zoho’s Chief Scientist and Co-founder Sridhar Vembu on Sunday explained the technological depth of homegrown engineering behind Arattai, Zoho’s India-made messaging app.

The application has gained significant traction on social media this week following endorsements from business leaders.

Vembu announced on X that Arattai's messaging/AV framework is built on 15 years of research, and the application has a distributed framework that allows decentralisation of workload among many servers and databases and provides fault tolerance, performance monitoring, and security.

Sridhar Vembu wrote, "Arattai is on the surface a simple product, but it has a lot of depth inside. Let me list the engineering frameworks (all homegrown) that power Arattai. First is what we call our messaging/AV framework. This has been the "real-time" workhorse of Zoho for a while and this is what offers you those crisp calls and meetings that connect quickly. It has been perfected for 15 years."

The distributed framework of the application is the backbone of Zoho and "powers a lot of what you see on the surface and also keeps our systems secure. We have been perfecting this for over 20 years now," he added.

Zoho has teams actively working on these frameworks and providing strong support to the Arattai team, he said, adding that the customers can expect more innovations from the platform soon.

Vembu has earlier said the company does not want Arattai to be a closed ecosystem like WhatsApp, but instead an open network that works seamlessly across platforms.

Arattai, launched in 2021, is positioned as a privacy-first messaging app with all Indian user data hosted within the country.

Voice and video calls are already end-to-end encrypted, while standard messages will get encryption in future updates.

Since September 25, Arattai has been averaging around one lakh downloads per day, compared to just 300 earlier, while daily active users rose 40 times in last week of September.

The surge began after government representatives highlighted the app, driving it to the top of India’s app charts.

--IANS

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