Zoho, an operating system for business, has released its most advanced self-service business intelligence and analytics platform yet, unleashing the power of data blending and artificial intelligence (AI).

Zoho Analytics enables organizations to analyze massive amounts of data in a much more efficient way and derive cross-functional business insights, a company statement said.

"At Zoho, we know what’s important for Sales, Marketing, Support, HR and Finance functions, as we ourselves offer business applications in each of these categories. With this deep understanding of business requirements, we have crafted dashboards that decision-makers and executives can use out-of-the-box from within Zoho Analytics, a unique analytics solution in the self-service BI market," said Hyther Nizam, VP of Product Management at Zoho.

"Now, organizations can leverage AI-powered technologies via Zoho Analytics, to correlate data that traditionally resided in departmental silos, into meaningful metrics that span across business functions. For example, being able to determine the impact of marketing spend on new sales,” he added.

“For a long time, we were facing challenges in making fact-based decisions and strategize effectively and keeping the team engaged with what was actually happening in our business. With Zoho Analytics at the center of our reporting and business intelligence, we now have all the key metrics of our business available to the Management. We now a clear picture of our business with data coming from various sources, analyzed and turned into engaging dashboards and charts that are accessible to us anytime and from anywhere,” said Alex Bendiouis, strategic director, LINKVIVA Live Communications.

The Dubai-headquartered LINKVIVA is an award-winning events and experiential agency striving for precision in design and delivery through relentless pursuit of innovation and creativity.

"Zoho Analytics' easy to use interface allows our business to quickly create reports specific to our-needs," said Nolan Davis, co-founder, Outdoor Sports Marketing. "The new release is a game-changer as it enables our sales reps to visually analyze their territory data and improve their sales productivity. As a Zoho customer for nine years, we couldn't be happier."

Summary of new capabilities

Auto-Blending

Zoho Analytics blends data automatically from multiple sources into reports and dashboards, letting users correlate business metrics across these sources. This allows a CXO to get end-to-end in-sights across multiple departments like marketing, sales, support, finance and others, all at one place, without having to switch applications. Zoho Analytics not only blends data coming from different Zoho apps, but also data from third-party apps.

Ask Zia

Zia, Zoho's intelligent assistant based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, is now part of Zoho Analytics. Users can ask Zia questions such as, "What was my monthly sales for the last year across regions?" Zia converts such questions to complex SQL queries in the back end and gives answers in the form of visual reports, without users having to create them manually.

Zia can auto-blend data and understand questions that span across business apps - e.g., "Give me the revenue per employee" - where revenue comes from the accounting app, and employee count comes from the HR app. Zia comes up with multiple suggestions as possible answers, from which users can choose the relevant report.

Forecasting

Zoho Analytics debuts Predictive Analytics with new forecasting capabilities. Users can now predict-future trends accurately based on their past data.

New Connectors

Zoho Analytics enriches its third-party integrations with six new connectors for popular business apps, expanding the number of connectors to over 100. Each of these connectors comes with more than 100 pre-built domain-specific reports and KPI dashboards that users can benefit from right away.

•    For social media agencies: Facebook Pages, Twitter handles, and Twitter competitive analytics
•    For marketing agencies: Bing Ads and Facebook Ads analytics
•    For HR leaders: Zoho People analytics

Enhanced visualization

Zoho Analytics includes a major overhaul to its visualization options. In addition to the existing 40+chart types, Zoho Analytics has added Geo-map charts to help visualize location data. Dark-themed dashboards, flexible dashboard layouts, heat maps, and dial gauges have also been added as new visualization options.

On-premise

In addition to the existing cloud version, Zoho Analytics introduces a new installable on-premise edition to offer deployment choices to users. The on-premise edition will help medium and large enterprises analyze their data stored in-house. This edition is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Analytics is available immediately in plans starting from $25 per month. Zoho Analytics is also part of Zoho One, the company's all-in-one suite of applications for running an entire business. – TradeArabia News Service