I use Zoho to run my business so I'm always watching for new announcements. Looks like they are getting into Business Intelligence. For data nerds like me, this is big news. Here's the press release they sent me:
Zoho Advances BI and Analytics Market with New Self-Service Platform; Transforms Relationships Between Businesses and Their Data
Platform delivers new AI-powered data preparation and management capabilities, deeper augmented analytics, improved data visualization and analysis to create actionable, industry-leading business insights.
AUSTIN, Texas - July 13, 2021 - 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
organizations to cleanse, unify, and analyze 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
organization, 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 analyze 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 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 organizations 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.
"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 organizations 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." - Raju Vegesna,
Chief Evangelist for Zoho
"Data is now the lifeblood of any organization of every size. The ability to harness analytics and
transform it into actionable insights is a strategic imperative — and something that is now far
too important to be held hostage by an enterprise analytics or business intelligence team. For
this reason, a new generation of self-service-first tools, such as Zoho's new BI platform, are
changing the way organizations look at the entire data-to-insight pipeline. This democratized
approach enables organizations to put the power of data — from collection, through cleaning
and analysis, to insight — into the hands of those who are best positioned to act upon it, and
create competitive advantage as a result." - Charles Araujo, Principal Analyst, Intellyx
Pricing and Availability
Zoho BI Platform, which includes Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep, is available immediately in
two versions, cloud and on-premise. For monthly option, the cloud version is $8 per user, per
month. The on-premise version is $30 per user, per month. For annual option, the cloud version
is $96 per user, per year. The on-premise version is $360 per user, per year.
Zoho DataPrep is also available as a standalone. The standard plan starts at $40 per month for
2 million rows including 3 users while the enterprise plan is highly customizable and the pricing
is based on the customization.
