Zoho is a large SaaS company, so meeting its team at a hosting conference is a little unexpected. At CloudFest Americas, Dinesh Arunachalam, Head of Channel Business for Zoho Workplace, explained why they came: the company is building a white label email product for web hosts.
Arunachalam described Zoho as a global SaaS company with close to three decades behind it, more than 60 applications and over 150 million users in 150 countries. He sits on the business development side of the productivity suite and runs its channel business.
The product in question is Zoho Mail, the business email and collaboration tool, which he said serves more than 20 million users and is among the company’s fastest growing products. Zoho is now repackaging it as a white label service that hosting providers can sell completely under their own brand. Hosting companies usually prefer to keep customers under their own name instead of sending them to a third-party brand, he explained. The host owns the sales cycle and avoids the work of managing business email for its install base, while the technology stays with Zoho.
That technology runs in data centers Zoho owns and maintains, more than 20 of them around the world. “We don’t run on any hyperscalers,” Arunachalam said.
His pitch to hosting providers starts with a problem they raise often. Many of their customers use cPanel or similar tools, and when a small business is setting up its brand, business email sits at the center of how it communicates with clients. Options for those customers are limited, he said. Zoho wants to offer the same email experience its existing users get to micro and small businesses, with web hosts as the first channel and primary target market.
The product is in beta now. Arunachalam said meeting a couple of large hosting providers exploring the beta was one reason for the trip to CloudFest Americas, and their feedback so far has been good. The public global launch is planned for March 2027.
