Zoho has provided a self-serve analytics solution since 2009, making incremental improvements and enhancements along the way. Yesterday they announced a new version of the BI platform that adds some significant new and enhanced capabilities. The platform is made up of four elements:

• Self-Serve data preparation and management

• Augmented analytics

• Data stories

• Marketplace apps

Zoho's underlying vision for prioritizing platform capabilities is guided by three activities; 1. data management, 2. visualization and analysis, and 3. insights and actions. From a user perspective these three activities are essential to extract the value from a BI solution. There are four types of analytics; descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. Traditional use of BI tools was focused on descriptive (showing history) and diagnostic (finding broken things). The more compelling use of a modern BI platform is uncovering insights from your data to drive better business decisions and business outcomes. That moves into predictive or finding the most likely outcomes, and prescriptive, or finding what actions to take that might influence those outcomes.

The insight developed using a BI platform is only as good as the data that you are using. The Zoho DataPrep service is a part of the newly released platform and includes several artificial intelligence (AI) enabled features including auto modeling, AI enabled "smart" data cleansing, AI transformation engine and machine learning (ML) based data enrichment. The solution includes a large list of integrations to internal Zoho apps and many other external data sources.

The new automation capabilities carries into the advanced analytics offering as well. In the new release they incorporate several features to help you find relevant insights and put them to use in the business. The Zoho AI-powered assistant Zia is used for surfacing insights automatically using natural language generation (NLG) and providing a conversational UI / conversational search for analytics using natural language query (NLQ). The features also include scenario based analysis using Zia and what-if modeling to support advanced business decision making.

One of the most useful capabilities that was released is called data stories. Telling compelling stories with your data allows you to more effectively influence decisions in the business. It's not an easy skill to develop and any assistance from automation / AI can reduce preparation time and lead to a better end result. Data stories uses embedded Zia combined with the existing app Slideshow and the analytics portal to display the story output. The analytics portal is limited to internal use for the stories currently but will add external capabilities in the future.

Embedded Zia assistant

Beyond the Zoho platform the Zoho Marketplace contains partner apps that extend the analytics capabilities even more. There are also deep native analytical apps, with domain-specific advanced analytics, available through third-party partner marketplaces including Shopify, ServiceNow and Atlassian.

The use of automation like AI, ML, NLQ, NLG with the conversational UI provided by the Zoho Zia assistant adds a great deal of new functionality to the Zoho BI Platform including boosting overall productivity for users. The new capabilities support finding more relevant insights faster to make critical business decisions, and with Data Stories, helps users present the insights in more influential ways.

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