From SaaS to silicon: How Zoho and a team of fresh engineering grads built an indigenous enterprise server

When Mangesh Sadafale, the Head of Hardware Development at Zoho, went to Sikkim on a family vacation a few years ago, he could not see, or rather he could not cross the iconic Nathu La pass due to bad weather. Years later, he would find himself staring down a different kind of impassable terrain. The road to designing an enterprise-grade, homegrown data centre server from scratch seemed next to impossible. Turns out, calling it “Nathu La” was perhaps the easiest job. “I proposed, can we give it the Nathu La Pass name? The team said yes,” Sadafale tells India Today…