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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. Business spending on analytics solutions continues to grow in Asia-Pacific (APAC), a 2021 report by technology research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), indicated that APAC spending for big data and analytics solutions were expected to total US$22.6bn in 2020. Three out of four APAC companies are intending to keep or expand their big data analytics investments this year.

With more than 50,000 organisations already using Zoho Analytics, the solution 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.

“We originally chose the Zoho BI platform because Zoho Analytics was able to give us a complete 360-degree view of our customer journey and made it easy to blend data from multiple systems to do so. It’s only continued to innovate.  While we used to spend a lot of time writing and maintaining custom scripts to import data, fix errors and transform the data, the new platform has helped us eliminate custom scripts and manual data preparation. With Zoho DataPrep, we easily found the errors in the data and fixed them all from within the tool, and are now able to completely automate data preparation. This brings immense value to our organisation as we are able to get the most relevant and accurate insight into our company-wide analytics while spending our time on more valuable tasks.” –  Claudio Cabeza, Director of Primo Group (Customer)

“Business analytics can only be as good as the quality of data fed into the system. 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.” – Gibu Mathew, VP & GM, APAC, Zoho Corporation

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