Zoho Advances BI, Analytics Market with Self-service Platform

Nosa Alekhuogie

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, has said its new Business Intelligence (BI) Platform, which is Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven data analytics solution, will empower businesses to surface precise and actionable insights, through self-service data preparation and augmented analytics.

Zoho also launched Zoho DataPrep, an augmented self-service data preparation and pipeline service.

Zoho’s end-to-end self-service BI Platform, which combines newly-launched Zoho DataPrep with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics, enables organisations 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.

Announcing the development, the Regional Manager, Africa, Zoho Corp, Andrew Bourne, said: “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.”

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 and scalability.

Some standout pillars of the platform, which allow businesses to perform better and remain competitive in their industries, include: Augmented Data Prep and Management, Data Stories, Augmented Analytics and Marketplace.

For Augmented Data Prep and Management, Zoho DataPrep, which is a new application, 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.

For Data Stories, Zoho’s BI platform offers an integrated enterprise portal builder and presentation software. 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.

Augmented Analytics supports Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI, that enables business users, with or without technical know-how, to surface data through natural language querying.

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, Bourne said.