Zoho Corp., a leading global technology company, announced the launch of new capabilities for Catalyst by Zoho, its cloud platform for application development, for developers and businesses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to turn AI-generated code into production-ready applications faster and with greater control.
The new enhancements to Catalyst enable developers to work directly with popular agentic AI coding assistants, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Developers can use the AI tools they already work with, while Catalyst provides the cloud infrastructure and controls needed to build and run applications, eliminating the need to stitch together multiple cloud services and vendors. This simplifiesdevelopment and future iterations while reducing operational complexity. The platform bridges the gap between code generation and reliable deployment by giving agentic AI coding assistants a structured, deterministic way to build and deploy applications.
“Agentic AI coding assistants have transformed how quickly applications are being created, but getting that code deployed and operating in production remains a major hurdle. For every app being built, developers spend a lot of time stitching together separate cloud services and managing infrastructure. We built Catalyst 3.0 to eliminate that friction. By delivering an agent-ready, full-stack platform, we are providing developers and AI agents complete freedom from managing cloud infrastructure. They can build, deploy, and scale applications faster safely, with far less operational overhead.” said Hyther Nizam, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Middle East and Africa region at Zoho.
Catalyst supports local data residency in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE with the platform hosted on Zoho’s data centre infrastructure within each respective country. This gives organizations in the region access to an AI-ready application development platform while supporting regional data residency requirements.
Catalyst 3.0 brings several improvements to the platform to make it better equipped to work with any AI coding assistant. To reduce the learning curve for the developers, Zoho has added Agentic AI skills that enable the AI coding assistants to understand the Catalyst platform and enable them to write production-grade code. Furthermore, the skills have also been made available across the Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor marketplaces, making it accessible for developers while helping them optimise token consumption.
To further improve the experience of AI-assisted coding sessions, Catalyst has introduced a non-interactive CLI (Command-Line Interface) that can perform tasks from start to finish without prompting the user for manual input during its execution. Additionally, MCP support for Catalyst enables a complete hands-off development process, with developers completing all actions and requests from within a single coding assistant console without the need to perform actions and configurations via the platforms’ UI console.
Orchestration, built into the Skill, ties the three capabilities together. When an AI coding assistant faces a decision about how to execute a request, the Skill routes it deterministically down the CLI or MCP path rather than leaving that choice to the model. This approach lowers the developer’s cognitive load, reduces the risk of incorrect tool selection, and helps produce more reliable, production-ready applications.
To strengthen developer trust and transparency, Zoho has made the AI skills available as an open-source repository for developers to be able to inspect and further add to. Zoho is also open-sourcing Catalyst’s SDK (Software Development Kit), CLI, as well as its lightweight Javascript Framework, Slyte.
Applications built on Catalyst benefit from Zoho’s security infrastructure, including DDoS protection, vulnerability assessments and penetration testing, SOC compliance and a web application firewall. Development and production environments are kept separate, ensuring AI agents cannot directly make changes to live applications. Businesses can also control what developers and AI agents are allowed to do, while detailed audit records provide visibility into actions and changes.
Additionally, Catalyst by Zoho offers a free student program across the region that includes full-stack hosting, functions, database, and AI tooling to enhance accessibility and empower future developers.
Zoho plans to continue expanding Catalyst to further embed AI in software development as it remains a relevant and practical tool for developers. This will include support for multiple AI agents working together, connections to additional AI tools and greater automation across the software development lifecycle