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Zoho Analytics - One Platform to Help them All

The News

On September 12, 2024, Zoho released a new, AI-rich version of Zoho Analytics that brings self-service BI to any persona in business.

The release added more than 100 features and now offers powerful AI and ML capabilities. These enable diagnostic insights, predictive analytics, and automatic report and dashboard generation. “Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions. The new version of Zoho Analytics has added power, intelligence, and flexibility to serve a broader range of businesses and users than competitors in the market.”

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform now offers more than 500 connectors to other systems, including streaming analytics. 

Overall, the new release offers new capabilities across four main categories:

●      Data Management Hub: Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights to accelerate business success

●      BI Infusion with Generative AI: Zoho Analytics has introduced Generative AI capabilities across the BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas.

●      Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML): Zoho Analytics now features the DSML Studio, allowing users to simply and quickly build custom machine learning models, which, for example, analyze or predict customer churn. n of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas.

●      Platform Extensibility: Zoho Analytics is more deeply extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. Zoho Analytics is a composable platform on which any analytical solution can be built.

Alun Rafique, CEO and Co-Founder of Market Dojo says about the new Zoho BI and Analytics Platform that "as developers, Zoho Analytics 6.0's new AutoML capabilities caught our attention immediately. Our team is currently working on a model to analyze and predict customer churn, among other projects. Zia Insights' diagnostic capabilities have been a game- changer as well, helping us understand the underlying causes of a spike or drop in sales or performance so we can take quick action. Again, as solutions providers, it's critical we understand what's working and what's not within our own company before helping other businesses and professionals. Zoho Analytics 6.0 continues to give us that insight and more. Ask Zia' is another useful feature. With a simple prompt, I'm able to get the right insights I need instantly. The new chart types are amazing, and I'm particularly impressed with the racing and sunburst charts." 

The bigger picture

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform has its origins in 2009 as one of the first self-service cloud BI platforms. It can be installed behind firewalls locally or can be deployed on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, it is available as an embedded platform that can be leveraged by other vendors. Originally, it was aimed at line-of-business users and in the meantime has evolved into a full-blown BI platform with around 17,000 customers, as of August 2024. Within the Zoho One suite, it is used by 70,000 business on a daily basis. This makes Zoho Analytics the second-most used app, after Zoho CRM, of the Zoho One suite.

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform covers the complete analytics workflow from data preparation through visualization and exploration. It addresses challenges that a broad range of users, from data scientists and developers to line-of-business users, have.

This new Zoho Analytics release features more than 100+ updates, including new visualizations, enhanced dashboard building, audit and admin controls, revamped mobile apps, right-to-left (RTL) support, and more.

The new version of the Zoho BI and Analytics Platform shall address five key challenges, namely:

●      Data velocity and diversity

●      Data management and -governance

●      Complex analytical needs

●      Limited adoption of analytics caused by diverse user needs

●      Rapid technology changes.

Zoho addresses these challenges using the four different categories listed above.

  1. Deepening the data and integration management using a powerful data management hub to establish a strong data and data management foundation

  2. Infusing AI, particularly generative AI, across the platform to accelerate BI adoption

  3. Increasing the ability to build machine learning models for analytics workloads by making this capability available to a broader user audience

  4. Enhancing the platform’s extensibility to serve more use cases.

My point of view and analysis

As my colleagues Brian Sommer and David Smith said in an article by Lynn Greiner on CIO.com, the Zoho BI and analytics platform has some key strengths, including the deep integration into the whole Zoho suite of applications while simultaneously offering “some 500 integrations to other firms’ software products and data”, which makes it a very good platform for generating insight from disparage sources. In combination with Zoho’s own and the ability to leverage external AI, this can lead to strongly improved business analyses and forecasts. 

With the help of decision intelligence that answers the very important question “why” and recommendation, immediate value can get created for business users.

Lastly, the strong support of very different user personas helps in making powerful analyses available throughout the enterprise.

You can download and read my full analysis on the Zoho BI and Analytics Platform directly from the Zoho site.

Disclosure: My report “One Platform to Help them All – The Zoho Analytics Platform” was commissioned by Zoho. Zoho did not and did not try to influence the analysis part of the report in any way.


 

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