Developers, meet Catalyst 2.0: one platform for all your custom development needs

Back when we launched Catalyst in 2021, you thought Catalyst was awesome. We (marketing and BD) did too. But our engineering team is a bunch of nerds, and they're constantly innovating to simplify the developer experience and address custom development needs. Thanks to them and to our passionate developers community, here we are today, pleased to launch Catalyst 2.0.
 

The next wave of digital innovation will be driven by AI and ML. With Catalyst 2.0 we are empowering developers to be at the forefront of this transformation by democratizing AI, ML and other technologies to address broad custom development needs. Driven by a deep understanding of the developer landscape, thanks to Zoho's extensive experience as a technology company and invaluable insights from countless user interactions, we re-built Catalyst to help developers build bespoke solutions.   

- Prabu Rajendran, Head of Engineering, Catalyst
 

Catalyst 2.0: an evolution from FaaS to PaaS

From its origin as a serverless/FaaS provider for web and basic mobile apps, Catalyst has evolved into a versatile platform that really puts power in the hands of creators. Using Catalyst, developers can now build a wide spectrum of solutions and products such as native mobile apps, hybrid apps, event-driven apps, progressive web apps, single-page apps, custom machine learning models, cross-platform apps using Flutter SDK, NLU-based chatbots, microservices, and more. From crafting full-stack asset management solutions to conversational chatbots, our customers are now overcoming unique and complex challenges with Catalyst. Only a pro-code platform like Catalyst can allow you to build bespoke front-ends with complete control of the backend.
 

Catalyst 2.0 is not an upgrade, but a complete orbital shift. Through its new services, Catalyst opens up a universe of limitless possibilities, where you can build practically anything you can imagine. Whether it is building conversational chatbots or robust ML models, steering digital transformation projects or modernizing legacies, Catalyst is the one platform you need to bring your boldest ideas to life.

- Poonam Singh, Head of Marketing, Catalyst
 

While we've engineered the platform to be more versatile, we also made sure to make the developer experience more efficient. We've fine-tuned things under the hood to make Catalyst zippier, like reducing latency through optimization of our proprietary architecture and rolling out a prebuilt code library that can be deployed in minutes! Plus, we've got your back with budget alerts, an extension for Visual Studio Code IDE, upgraded CLI, advanced authentication, environment variables, API gateway, and application performance monitoring. So we expect developers to be able to do a lot more than they can do today.
 

While we extended the platform's applicability, we made sure to extend its reach too by rapidly adding new data centers and more language support. We started out with just one data center in the US, but have now grown to four data centers strategically located around the globe. Responding to demand, we've added Python support and introduced AppSail, allowing developers to employ frameworks like Flask, Django, and more, empowering developers like you to craft your visions with your preferred tools.
 

What's new?

Here's a fantastic lineup of new services and features that reflect our commitment to empowering the developer community.
 

➤➤  QuickML: ML-based predictions at your fingertip

What's unique?

QuickML helps you build, train, and deploy powerful machine-learning models to generate predictive insights rapidly. Using QuickML you can choose from a range of classification and regression algorithms to create machine learning pipelines. Compared to other ML tools, its simple point-and-click visual interface with easy data visualization enables even line-of-business users without any data science experience to tackle machine learning challenges head-on. No need to program or write any code.

Some use cases

• Predictive lead scoring and customer churn prediction to improve revenue opportunities. Or build a sales deal prediction model like this one.  

• Product recommendation and personalization

• Demand forecasting, capacity planning, predictive maintenance, and others
   

QuickML puts an impressive arsenal of algorithms at your command to solve diverse business problems from reducing churn and optimizing inventory to tackling complex fraud detection. Picture this remarkable capability at your fingertips! The best part? It's all through an effortless drag-and-drop interface. Zero coding needed to turn your data into predictive insights. Our roadmap includes adding deep learning, reinforcement learning, recommendation system, and LLM capabilities to enable you to explore new possibilities like automated support ticket answering and email draft generation.

- Poonam Singh, Head of Marketing, Catalyst
 

➤➤ AppSail: One-click and deploy ZeroOps PaaS tool   

What's unique?

AppSail is our ZeroOps PaaS offering that lets you build, host, deploy, and scale web apps and mobile apps quickly. Migrate easily from one platform to another because all you need is a single package such as a WAR file for Java or packages for Python or NodeJS. AppSail can run the WAR/JAR/package as you deploy, significantly reducing your effort. You can use many frameworks in AppSail. Some examples are below.  

Some frameworks

• Python frameworks: Django, Flask, CherryPy, Bottle, Falcon, Pyramid, Tornado, etc.

• Java frameworks: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Struts, Vaadin, etc.

• Node.js frameworks: Express, Hapi, Koa, Restify, Fastify, etc.
   

➤➤  ConvoKraft: Build context-aware, NLU-powered chatbots

What's unique?

Powered by NLU, ConvoKraft helps you build intelligent chatbots to deliver next-level interactive experiences by engaging customers with human-like flair. These chatbots can engage in human-like conversations and respond intuitively to natural language inputs.

Some use cases

• Create a customer onboarding bot

• Virtual shopping assistants   

• Appointment booking bot for salons and hospitals
   

➤➤  SmartBrowz: a unified browser automation platform  

What's unique?

SmartBrowz introduces a revolutionary approach to managing headless browsers, browser isolation, and their dependencies. By harnessing the power of headless browsers, we enable you to automate browser tasks. And when APIs are not readily available, you can use the service to achieve a particular action. With SmartBrowz you can run iterative tests on your web application and customize templates to simplify redundancies. You can explore SmartBrowz in two variants: as a CDP endpoint for connectivity or within a Browser Logic function that effortlessly opens browsers when needed.

Some use cases

• Browser automation. Example: Assume that you want to book tickets to your favorite show but tickets are unavailable. You can use headless browsers to receive a notification once tickets become available or even automate the booking process.  

• ‌Web crawling to effortlessly extract data from websites. Example: tracking stock prices in real-time data or monitoring the price of competitor products.

• If you do not want to conduct scraping from scratch, Dataverse offers you three powerful APIs to perform complex web scrapping operations with utmost ease, where data is pre-scraped. All you need is to call the APIs.

• PDF and screenshot generation. Example: Fetching timesheets from projects and creating custom invoices using PDF generation on SmartBrowz. Or build a payslip generator app like this.

• Convert anything to API when a specific API isn't readily available
   

➤➤  Zoho CRM Event Listeners  

What's unique?

The service allows free and scalable data transfer between Zoho CRM and Catalyst. It does not utilize the webhook calls as part of the Zoho CRM license plan. Instead, it listens to a preconfigured action in Zoho CRM and triggers the associated target function on event occurrence, facilitating seamless data flow between Zoho CRM and Catalyst.
 

Catalyst truly surpassed our expectations for optimizing CRM workflows for our business. The intuitive interface and powerful features streamlined our processes and improved team productivity...Catalyst is the go-to platform for seamless CRM integration and has become an indispensable asset for our business growth.

—Shahan Farid, CEO of AquaOrange
 

  ➤➤  CodeLib: build at warp speed       

What's unique?

ColdeLib is a library of reusable, production-ready solutions that you can add to your Catalyst project. When you install the pre-packaged CodeLib solution, these are automatically added to your project and deployed to the Catalyst console from the CLI. These battle-tested solutions will slash your development time substantially, as you won't need to write a ton of code to achieve these capabilities.   
 

➤➤  Personalized console: your productivity companion  

What's unique?

Catalyst offers a unique console that dynamically customizes to the user's needs to personalize their development experience.   The console in Catalyst 2.0 is designed to make your life easier from day one, whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out. (Catch more new feature goodness here) 
 

Customers like you share their experience

Discover how trailblazers like Swiggy are leveraging QuickML to deploy ML models seamlessly. Swiggy is India’s leading on-demand delivery platform with ‌32 million monthly active users and a fleet of 200,000 delivery executives.
 

Our People Analytics team at Swiggy had been trying to build the "unhappy employee" prediction model using contemporary Python scripts and the like. However, the ML Ops was a big challenge we were facing while deploying these solutions. Catalyst QuickML with its API capabilities helped us deploy the model overnight, and then use the production data back in our data mart for interventions.

Daksh Sahni, People Analytics & Behavioral Sciences

Swiggy
 

An integrated all-in-one platform

This evolution is meant to give developers a unified platform with all the tools they need to develop across devices and use cases.
 

When you build or test, you are not just building or testing your code, you are testing the whole solution. That’s why development tooling, CI, CD, building, deploying, testing, must all come together in one integrated toolchain. We take great pride in being the industry first to offer an integrated console from day one.

- Prabu Rajendran, Head of Engineering, Catalyst
 

Catalyst 2.0 brings broad platform capabilities with resiliency, agility, and above all, uncompromising security. Of course, there are other large cloud providers in the market who also offer many of these services. Few, however, have put the same emphasis on security and ownership of tech stack as Catalyst does.

- Poonam Singh, Head of Marketing, Catalyst

Coming soon!  

Hold onto your hats, developers! We're thrilled to give you a teaser of some soon-to-be-released services that level up your Catalyst experience. These include an API management service, an event bus service, and a platform to empower developers with secure coding training.  Your Catalyst journey is about to get even more powerful!
 

Sign up for free trial 

Catalyst 2.0 is built with your success in mind. We have poured our hearts and souls into creating a platform that simplifies your development journey. We cannot wait to see all that you accomplish with Catalyst.

Happy coding!

#SimplestDevPlatform
 

Catalyst resources

• View Catalyst documentation

• Go hands-on with these tutorials

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