Zoho Adds Capabilities to Catalyst

Zoho has enhanced Catalyst by Zoho, its platform-as-a-service (PaaS), now weaving agentic development capabilities directly into the coding environments. Additions include Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and integrations for agentic artificial intelligence coding assistants, including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.

Catalyst by Zoho is now offering a free student program that includes full-stack hosting, functions, database, and AI tooling to enhance accessibility and empower future developers.

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. Developers can use the AI coding assistants of their choice while Catalyst provides the underlying full-stack serverless infrastructure and controls.

"By delivering an agent-ready, serverless full-stack platform, Catalyst gives developers and AI agents complete cloud independence to build, deploy, and scale intelligent applications, with far less operational overhead," said Anand Nergunam, vice president of revenue growth at Zoho, in a statement. "Additionally, to democratize access we are launching a free student tier, freeing students from the burden of traditional development cycles so they can thrive in a rapidly shifting landscape."

Catalyst's new capabilities include the following:

• Catalyst Agent Skills, giving coding assistants the context they need to understand Catalyst services, architecture, and recommended development patterns. The Skill guides the assistant toward the appropriate capabilities and workflows, optimizing token use, and generating accurate, verified output .
• The non-interactive CLI allows AI coding assistants to execute multi-step workflows in Catalyst.
• The Catalyst MCP server provides AI coding assistants direct access to Catalyst capabilities from developers' existing environments. Actions such as creating a database table or adding a column can be performed directly from VS Code, Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI IDE without switching to the Catalyst 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.
• Applications built on Catalyst run inside Zoho's own data centers and inherit Zoho's robust security infrastructure, including DDoS protection, SOC compliance, regular vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), a web application firewall, and more.
• Decoupled environments keep development and production separate. Code moves to production by manual promotion only.
• Scoped collaborator controls define who or what can participate in development and which actions they can perform.
• Full audit trails provide records to assist with oversight, including application logs, platform logs, and MCP tool-call logs. From this data, developers can track precisely which actions the AI agent took, and when. Every change after launch is versioned, attributable, and reversible.