Hyther Nizam, VP of Products, Zoho
| Photo Credit:
Naveen P M
When BigBasket was evaluating various ERPs to streamline procurement, customisation was a key requirement and the procurement team built one themselves using low-code application development platform Zoho Creator. The custom ERP has today centralised their Capex process, improving its overall efficiency. It was Zoho’s propreitary scripting language Deluge (Data Enriched Language for the Universal Grid Environment) that helped a largely non-tech team build the application.
As AI transforms coding and democratises it for non-developers, SaaS major Zoho Corp is betting big on its proprietary language Deluge. Co-architected by Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu with a small team back in 2005, Deluge is a low-code scripting language and platform used within the Zoho ecosystem to extend and customise its applications.
In the 20th year of Deluge, Zoho is now drawing up plans to make the language open-source as it also adds an AI layer to it. Deluge now has a network of over 4 million developers, the company said.
“The decision to make Deluge open source has been taken up internally, but it’s a framework has been there with us for 20 years, so we need to now make sure it’s easily consumable for others and also knock off any proprietary elements,” Hyther Nizam, VP of Products, Zoho, and one of the early architects of Deluge team, told businessline in an interaction. This way, it’s not just Zoho customers but wider enterprise users who can use natural language prompts to design their own custom apps.
In the application development life cycle, a lot of time is spent on the mundane stuff on what we call ‘the boiler plate codes,’ says Nizam, explaining the genesis of Deluge. “So we thought, what about a programming language given to the user directly who can play with the data directly and build those applications rather than going through layers of layers of middleman in between,” he adds.
As Zoho was considering foray into cloud products back in the early 2000s, the leadership found the programming languages in use back then limiting, and wanted to reduce complexities in coding, resulting in setting up a team to build Deluge. It also follows the SaaS firm’s strategy to own and run its entire technology stack right from data centres to the applications.
Deluge was then introduced to Zoho’s end users via their low-code platform Zoho Creator. The language has recorded 25 billion executions yearly, and more than 95 per cent of Zoho’s enterprise customers rely on Deluge, Nizam adds.
Zoho is now also adding an AI layer on top of Deluge. “With this AI layer now, it can generate the Deluge code for you and you have to just prompt it in natural language. Deluge itself provides like 10X productivity and this is going to now provide 100X productivity while rolling out complex applications,” he adds.
In a bid to take the programming language mainstream, Zoho is also partnering with government and private educational institutes to incorporate Deluge as part of their course work and skill development programs.
Nizam also notes that Deluge is not easy to replicate by others working on low-code platforms since it was born out of Zoho’s “conviction” that a programming language “has to natively respect the data structure and the permissions.”
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Published on September 2, 2025