Zoho Analytics — One Platform to Help them All
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 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:
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:
Zoho addresses these challenges using the four different categories listed above.
- Deepening the data and integration management using a powerful data management hub to establish a strong data and data management foundation
- Infusing AI, particularly generative AI, across the platform to accelerate BI adoption
- Increasing the ability to build machine learning models for analytics workloads by making this capability available to a broader user audience
- Enhancing the platform’s extensibility to serve more use cases.
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.
Originally published at https://aheadcrm.blogspot.com on September 12, 2024.
