Zoho announces major new Business Intelligence platform

Platform delivers new AI-powered data preparation and management capabilities, deeper augmented analytics, improved data visualisation and analysis to create actionable, industry-leading business insights

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today 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. Below are four standout pillars of this platform, which allow businesses to perform better and remain competitive in their industries:

1) Augmented Data Prep and Management – Zoho DataPrep, a new application, 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.

2) Data Stories – Zoho’s BI Platform now offers an integrated enterprise portal builder (Zoho Sites) and presentation software (Zoho Show). Embedding live reports and dashboards into a website or presentation allows administrators to wrap additional context around data and foster more immersive discussion on business matters. Data Stories reduces friction within an organisation, so that businesses can be data-driven without needing to learn new tools.

3) Augmented Analytics – Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI, enables business users — with or without technical know-how — to surface data through natural language querying. Additionally, the all-new 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. Zia Insights also includes what-if capability, enabling scenario analysis for effective decision-making.

4) Marketplace – Through Zoho Marketplace, an apps marketplace, Zoho 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.

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 visualisation by using natural language querying and generation, text narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, and cognitive and advanced 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%  YoY with a 40%YoY increase in the enterprise segment. The application has seen a 10% jump in customers switching from competitive platforms. Also, 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.

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Statements for Media:

“Zoho DataPrep is an essential tool for our business. As a record label we deal with millions of micro-transactions across thousands of titles and hundreds of stores in dozens of territories. Zoho DataPrep gives us a deep dive into the data, enabling the creation of valuable analytics in seconds at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.” – Andrew Archer, Manager, Global Underground Limited (Customer, UK)

“We selected Zoho Analytics for its integration capabilities, but it becomes more powerful for us with each use. It helps us ensure data integrity and find critical trends in our business. One thing that surprised me has been the ability for Zia Insights to pull out relevant observations on the data which are useful and not immediately apparent. Zoho Analytics not only helps us save time in generating insight but also assists us in increasing our baseline revenues, spotting trends, finding potential customers, and identifying industries and regions that are profitable. It also brought down time spent on report generation and sharing from 2 days per month to minutes, and increased our overall revenue by five percent.” – Alun Rafique, CEO & Cofounder, Market Dojo (Customer, UK)

“Self-service data preparation, computer-augmented analysis and in-context story telling are three important, 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.” – Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research (Research Analyst)

“For data to be a true catalyst of business growth, there can’t be any gaps in the collection, management, or analysis process. Too few BI platforms in the market excel in both data preparation and analytics, which leaves businesses with weak — or worse, flawed — insights. Zoho’s BI Platform is industry-leading because it ensures organisations are acting on legitimate data, which can be effectively leveraged to determine new revenue streams, refocus funds, drive productivity, and overall gain a competitive edge among peers in their market.” – Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe (Company Executive)

Pricing and Availability

Zoho BI Platform, which includes Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep, is available immediately in two versions, cloud and on-premise. For the monthly option, the cloud version is £6.40 per user, per month. The on-premise version is £24 per user, per month. For the annual option, the cloud version is £61 per user, per year. The on-premise version is £288 per user, per year.

Zoho DataPrep is also available as a standalone. The standard plan starts at £30 per month for 2 million rows including 3 users while the enterprise plan is highly customisable and the pricing is based on the customisation.

For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/analytics/

Disclaimer: All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners.

About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific software companies.

Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 9,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, India with European headquarters in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. Read more about Zoho’s privacy commitment here: https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html. Zoho operates its own datacentres across the world, including two in Europe. More than 60 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com