Zoho Analytics has had a more than a decade old journey. Launched as a pioneering, cloud-only BI service in 2009 as Zoho Reports, we had Zoho Analytics 4.0 in November 2018. Since then, we have been continuously working on bringing in new functionalities to the product that help you unlock insights from continuously growing data. The culmination of which is today’s announcement, Zoho Analytics 5.0.
Broadly speaking, the Zoho Analytics 5.0 Platform comprises of,
1. Zoho Analytics, a self-service BI and analytics software, that is available on the cloud, on premise, embedded, and deployable in public clouds.
2. Zoho DataPrep, an augmented data preparation and management service, available on the cloud.
3. Zoho Analytics Embedded BI, offering ISVs and developers to integrate Zoho Analytics seamlessly into their product/solution offering
4. Zoho Analytics Marketplace, which allows partners and third-party vendors to build analytics apps on top of Zoho Analytics and market in Zoho Marketplace. Also included are Zoho Analytics Native Apps, apps built by us and natively embedded within third-party apps, and available in their marketplaces.
Let’s look into key capabilities rolling into Zoho Analytics 5.0.
Zoho DataPrep
Studies indicate 80% of the time is spent on cleaning and preparing the data before analyzing it. That’s where a service like Zoho DataPrep comes in. Zoho DataPrep allows you to connect, prepare, cleanse, transform, model, and catalog your data.
While Zoho DataPrep is available as a standalone product, it is joined at the hip with Zoho Analytics. Zoho Analytics users can use Zoho DataPrep from within Zoho Analytics seamlessly. This integration vastly improves the ETL (extract-transform-load) capabilities of Zoho Analytics, as you can connect, clean, transform and enrich data from inside Zoho Analytics itself.
Augmented Analytics
Analytics is now becoming more and more augmented, as AI and ML technologies assist you in getting faster, better and powerful insights from your data.
With Ask Zia, there’s no need to learn complex SQL querying. You can hold colloquial conversations with our smart AI assistant Zia, and get the answers you need as relevant reports. Zia understands English and Spanish (in Beta).
Zia also assists you by providing inferences for any report or dashboard. With Zia Insights, you get instant insights through smart narratives, with the click of a button.
More augmented capabilities including what-if analysis, cognitive analytics and new forecasting models are rolling into Zoho Analytics 5.0.
Data Stories
So, you have analyzed the data and found some valuable inferences. And you want to present them to your audience in the right way that will provide maximum impact. That’s where crafting data stories comes in.
With Zoho Analytics 5.0, you can create immersive analytical presentations embedding reports & dashboards along with rich narrative elements into your slides. . This is possible, thanks to our seamless integration with Zoho Show.
What’s more, thanks to our easy website builder Zoho Sites, you can create purpose-built analytics specific portals, to share insights within your organization.
7 New Business App Connectors
Zoho Analytics provides easy connectors with 50+ popular business apps, that come with pre-built reports and dashboards. You can jumpstart your analytics instead of starting to build your reports from scratch. In 5.0, we are introducing 7 new connectors for Bigin, Zoho Sprints, Exact Online, Jira, LinkedIn Pages, ServiceNow, and WooCommerce.
New Dashboards Mobile App
We have had the Zoho Analytics mobile app in App Store and Play Store for a few years now. The mobile app now supports conversational analytics with Ask Zia. You can now converse with Ask Zia and get insights as answers. You can also add comments, and collaborate with your colleagues too.
Also today, as part of the 5.0 launch, we are introducing a completely immersive native app named Zoho Analytics – Dashboards. With creative gestures and interactions the app helps you quickly access and analyze your dashboards in Zoho Analytics and get insights on the go.
Download the new app from App Store or Play Store.
Other than the above, Zoho Analytics 5.0 comes packed with 60+ features. Like client portal, tabbed dashboards, import templates, windowing and granularity functions, viewer mode, word cloud chart, custom image background charts, KPI dial widgets, night mode and more.
Want to find out more about the 5.0 release? Join our experts and learn everything about Zoho Analytics 5.0 through a series of interactive webinars. Register now! Or, head to our What’s New page.
Nice one Zoho.