Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, announced its new Business Intelligence (BI) Platform – an AI-driven data analytics solution empowering businesses to surface precise and actionable insights through self-service data preparation and augmented analytics.
Combining newly launched Zoho DataPrep with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics, Zoho’s end-to-end self-service BI Platform enables organisations to cleanse, unify, and analyse cross-departmental data, obtain an encyclopedic view of the company, and ultimately move toward a more competitive business strategy based on real-time insights.
Zoho’s BI Platform brings together pre-built, visual dashboards, comprehensive data integrations, data preparation, augmented and embedded BI, security and privacy capabilities, flexible deployment models (cloud or on-premise), and scalability.
Standout pillars of the Zoho BI platform
Augmented Data Prep and Management
Zoho DataPrep is an AI and machine learning driven self-service data preparation tool.
The addition of Zoho DataPrep to the BI Platform allows business users to easily create and manage data pipelines that enable them to integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalogue data before making it ready for analysis.
Data Stories
Zoho’s BI Platform now offers an integrated enterprise portal builder in Zoho Sites and presentation software in Zoho Show.
Embedding live reports and dashboards into a website or presentation allows administrators to wrap additional context around data and foster more discussion on business matters.
Data Stories reduces friction within an organisation, so that businesses can be data-driven without needing to learn new tools.
Augmented Analytics
Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI, enables business users — with or without technical know-how – to surface data through natural language querying.
Zia Insights provides textual narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, which significantly reduces the time and effort required to explore data and glean insights.
It also includes what-if capability to enable scenario analysis for effective decision-making.
Marketplace
Zoho Marketplace is enabling partners to develop and publish analytical apps and integrations to complement Zoho Analytics users, thereby strengthening the BI and Analytics platform.
Another dimension is the launch of deep native analytical apps, with domain-specific advanced analytics, in third-party marketplaces such as Shopify, ServiceNow and Atlassian.
Harnessing the new Zoho BI Platform
The new Zoho BI Platform is built for scale and is extensible to more than 250 data sources – including Zendesk, HubSpot, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Stripe and Google, allowing businesses to integrate and analyse data sourced from diverse third-party systems.
Blending with outside data sources has always been one of the key strengths of Zoho Analytics, and a value demonstrated by the fact that 60%of existing users have chosen it as their BI tool while solely running on non-Zoho applications and data sources.
The BI platform gives users on-demand insight into operational data to inform critical business decisions with the support of Zia, Zoho’s AI tool.
Zia augments data preparation and visualization by natural language querying and generation, text narration of insights from reports and dashboards, and cognitive analytics.
These self-service and real-time capabilities make it possible to capture actionable data insights to boost operational efficiency and productivity.
With more than 50,000 organisations already using it, Zoho Analytics has consistently been one of the company’s fastest growing products. Within the last two years, Zoho Analytics has grown by 30% annually with a 40% annual increase in the enterprise segment.
The application has seen a 10% jump in customers switching from competitive platforms. 50% of the customers have chosen Zoho Analytics after evaluating multiple competitive BI products.
With this new BI Platform, Zoho expects above 45% YOY revenue growth.
Commentary on the new Zoho BI platform
“Our ultimate goal is to have a dashboard that paints a detailed, real-time picture of our business data, for example sales per account and per product, in one place.”
“We want to build a dashboard that’s cooperative and forms detailed reports that allow us to make informed and strategic decisions to grow and improve our business.”
“Zoho’s BI Platform will form the master hub of our business, helping us work smarter and more efficiently, for a long time to come,” said Jarrayd Apelt, Operations Manager, Inform Ag
“Self service data preparation, augmented analysis and in-context storytelling are important and emerging capabilities that set industry leading BI and analytics platforms apart.”
“The ability to build and share analytic apps is yet another differentiator, so I’m particularly excited to see Zoho enabling customers to publish breakthrough, data-driven applications,” said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“For data to be a true catalyst of business growth, there can’t be any gaps in the collection, management, or analysis process. Few BI platforms in the market excel in both data preparation and analytics, which leaves businesses with weak and flawed BI data insights.”
“Zoho’s BI Platform is an industry leader. It ensures that companies act on legitimate data, effectively leveraged to determine new revenue streams, refocus funds, drive productivity, and gain a competitive edge among sector peers,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho.
Zoho BI Platform, which includes Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep, is available immediately in two versions, cloud and on-premise. For monthly options, the cloud version is $8 per user, per month. The on-premise version is $30 per user, per month. For annual options, the cloud version is $108 per user, per year. The on-premise version is $360 per user, per year.
