Analyst: Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Document #: MCNKK202409
The News: Zoho announced it has released a completely revamped version of Zoho Analytics, the company’s reporting and business intelligence (BI) tool, to incorporate more than 100 new features, including many powered by artificial intelligence. The new platform features Zia, an AI assistant that supports natural language queries and diagnostic analytics, which enables users from across the organization, including data analysts, business analysts, line managers, and executives, to understand their business data and surface insights quickly.
Zoho Announces Revamped Version of Zoho Analytics
Analyst Take: Zoho announced a new version of Zoho Analytics, the company’s self-service BI and analytics platform. This version features more than 100 enhancements that leverage AI and ML capabilities. These new capabilities help to enable diagnostic insights, predictive analysis, and automated report and dashboard generation.
Zoho Analytics now also includes a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with Open AI, and third-party BI platform extensions, which the company believes will help organizations automate insights and visualizations, detect anomalies, and generate predictive models more quickly.
Product Enhancements to Enable Scalable Data Management and AI Integration
The latest version of Zoho Analytics incorporates several advancements designed to accomplish tasks that have become crucial in most data-driven organizations. First, Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights. The platform has added Stream Analytics and 25 new data connectors, resulting in more than 500 connectors to other applications and data sources. This enables users to create and manage complex ETL data pipelines via Zoho Analytics’ visual builder, ensuring data is properly extracted, transformed, and deposited.
This enables organizations to apply AI across all relevant data, which is critical for enabling real-time, data-driven decision-making. Without the ability to apply AI across all data (customer, product, supply chain, production, and ambient factors, the insights and predictions will not be as accurate and robust as possible, reducing the overall impact and ROI of any AI investment.
Zoho Analytics’ new Unified Metrics Layer is another tool that should help drive better ROI by enabling more efficiency. The Unified Metrics Layer lets users define, standardize, monitor, access control, and catalog all business metrics in a single pane. Providing data within a single pane of glass is quickly becoming a standard feature of many BI systems and ensures that users can always stay on top of changes. The Zoho Analytics platform also extends to serve in a Headless BI mode, allowing data apps to consume the same metrics in real time for consistent and dependable insights.
BI Infused with Generative AI
Another core element of Zoho Analytics is the introduction of generative AI capabilities delivered across the entire BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas within the organization. The following features are incorporated within the platform and designed to reduce friction with complex software applications and tools.
- Diagnostic Analysis: Zia Insights, Zoho’s AI-powered, automated insights engine, now provides diagnostic analytics contextually.
- Ask Zia, Zoho’s Natural Language Querying AI copilot, now also understands Spanish and French, enabling users to trigger actions and build custom data models in three languages. Users can now converse with Ask Zia within IM channels, including Microsoft Teams, to generate deeper, faster, and more contextual insights and actions using natural language, enabling all types of users to interact easily with data.
- Zoho Analytics has added Auto Analysis, enabling AI-powered automated metrics, reports, and dashboard generation.
- Zoho Analytics’ seamless Open AI integration—enabled by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—drives more relevant and accurate query responses. Using Open AI APIs with BYOK (Bring Your Own Key), users can more easily find public datasets and create formula and SQL queries.
DSML Studio
Zoho Analytics now features the Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) Studio, allowing users to quickly build custom machine learning models, such as analyzing or predicting customer churn. DSML Studio now provides the following capabilities:
- AutoML, a no-code assistant enabling users to build and train custom ML models easily
- Code Studio, the platform’s new integrated Python code environment where users can create custom ML models and import Python models or externally built libraries, which can be executed within the platform.
As SMB and mid-market organizations continue to grow, off-the-shelf models may not be sufficient to account for the businesses or its customers’ unique aspects. The ability to create custom ML models becomes critical to their ability to leverage increasing customer activity data that can impact customer loyalty, retention, and other key business metrics.
Platform Extensibility
Zoho Analytics has also been redesigned to be more extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. It incorporates a new BI fabric that allows businesses to consolidate insights from multiple BI platforms, such as Power BI and Tableau, onto a single searchable analytics portal. Within Zoho Analytics, users can trigger actionable workflows, including URL and Webhook actions. The platform integrates seamlessly with Zoho Flow, enabling 500+ app triggers.
A no-code data connector builder allows users to create custom connectors to bring data from any custom application. Partners can also build data connectors that can be published and sold on Zoho Marketplace.
These new enhancements incorporated within Zoho Analytics line up with the growing demand of businesses to access data held wherever it lives within the organization and view and manipulate it through the platform or application of their choice. While Zoho would, of course, prefer that customers utilize their entire suite of applications to run their entire business, the reality is that organizations tend to have several preferred applications and want the flexibility to manage and interact with data based on their users’ needs and preferences. Zoho Analytics’ open approach to data helps to meet that need.
Pricing and Availability
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Zoho Analytics is its pricing structure. Zoho has made a name for itself by offering tremendous functionality at prices that smaller and mid-market companies can handle. A basic product version starts at just $24 per month, billed annually, and rises to $455 monthly for the full enterprise license.
Zoho Analytics is generally available now and represents the next step in Zoho’s transformation from just being a lower-cost option for small or new businesses to a technology provider that can meet the needs of large enterprises. As the organization incorporates this enterprise-grade functionality, Zoho will need to develop a sales organization and strategy that highlights not just the cost messaging but the total business ROI that can be achieved via their platform and applications.
You can read more about the new version of Zoho Analytics at Zoho’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
