Zoho takes on SAP, Oracle with Made-for-India ERP bet

ERP is shaping up as the next big battleground in enterprise technology, and India’s most prominent SaaS firm, Zoho, is making a decisive move. Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu says the company’s newly unveiled Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform—built ground-up for India’s digital economy—aims to challenge global heavyweights such as SAP and Oracle.

After nearly 15 years of work, including five years of intensive research and development, Zoho believes it has reached an inflection point. “We have been dreaming of doing this for a while. The last five years have been very hard work—R&D that has taken us to this point. Finally, we are ready to unveil this,” Vembu said in an interview to CNBC-TV18.

Built for India’s digital rails

Unlike legacy ERP systems developed for Western markets, Zoho’s new platform is designed specifically for India’s highly digitised economic infrastructure. From UPI and Aadhaar to GST, India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) has created operating realities that global ERP systems often struggle to address natively.

“The legacy ERPs are not actually ready,” Vembu said. “They retrofit all of this—whether it’s GST, whether it’s UPI, banking integrations—because they don’t exist this way even in Western nations.”

Zoho’s ERP, he added, is built from the ground up for India’s “very connected economy”, rather than relying on bolt-on integrations. The company positions this as a structural advantage at a time when Indian enterprises—across manufacturing, services and MSMEs—are scaling rapidly on digital rails that are unique to the country.

AI-native architecture, long-term bet

Zoho is also pitching the platform as AI-native, embedding intelligence across finance, operations and compliance workflows rather than layering AI features on top of legacy architecture. While the company has not disclosed commercial rollout timelines or pricing details, the ERP push signals a strategic shift toward owning the enterprise backbone, an area traditionally dominated by SAP and Oracle.

Industry watchers see ERP as one of the most lucrative and sticky segments in enterprise software, with long implementation cycles and high switching costs. For Zoho, success here could significantly deepen its presence in large and mid-sized enterprises, beyond its well-known CRM and SaaS portfolio.

Product focus meets distributed R&D

The ERP launch is closely tied to Zoho’s distinctive operating model. Vembu said the company is expanding its product-focused campuses across Tamil Nadu, with ERP and finance emerging as key focus areas.

Zoho already has operations in Tenkasi and Kumbakonam, with smaller offices in Karaikudi, a fast-growing campus in Palladam near Coimbatore, and upcoming campuses in Madurai and near Thiruvai. “We like to put a specific product focus to our locations. Here, our finance suite and our ERP will become a major product focus,” Vembu said.

This distributed R&D approach, which Zoho describes as “rural development through research and development”, is aimed at tapping into what Vembu calls vast, underutilised talent pools outside India’s major tech hubs.

Also Read | Zoho launches Made-in-India ERP; to increase Kumbakonam workforce to 2,000

Challenging global incumbents from India

By anchoring its ERP strategy to India’s digital public infrastructure and a long-term R&D-heavy approach, Zoho is betting that global incumbents will struggle to re-architect products originally designed for very different markets.

As Indian enterprises grow in scale and complexity, the company believes demand will rise for systems built natively for local regulatory, payments and identity frameworks—rather than retrofitted solutions.

Watch accompanying video for entire conversation.