Zoho Analytics update adds GenAI tools, data science studio
New capabilities for the vendor's GenAI assistant include insight generation, while a studio for data science and machine learning enables various personae to do predictive BI.
Zoho Analytics on Thursday launched its latest platform update, highlighted by a data science and machine learning studio that enables predictive analysis and new generative AI capabilities aimed at simplifying and broadening BI use.
In addition, the update includes new data management capabilities aimed at improving the accuracy of data-informed decisions and a fabric that enables customers to combine and prepare data from multiple analytics platforms.
Together, the new capabilities are a significant advancement for Zoho that help it compete technologically while providing its platform at a lower cost than some of its peers, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
Zoho's analytics platform is available in four pricing tiers. They range from Basic, at $24 per month for two users and 500,000 rows of data, to Enterprise, at $455 per month for 50 users and 50 million rows.
Comparatively, Tableau ranges from a low of $35 per month for each user for its most basic subscription to $115 per month for each user for its most expansive subscription, which would equate to $5,750 per month for 50 users. Similarly, Qlik comes at a higher price than Zoho, while Microsoft Power BI is less expensive on a per-user basis at its Pro level but more expensive at its Premium level.
[The update] is a significant upgrade because it's adding sophisticated capabilities provided by … more expensive market offerings. The data prep, data modeling and predictive data science capabilities, in particular, are very much in demand by more sophisticated organizations.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
Unlike Zoho, however, Tableau, Qlik and Power BI do not place limitations on row usage.
"[The update] is a significant upgrade because it's adding sophisticated capabilities provided by … more expensive market offerings," Henschen said. "The data prep, data modeling and predictive data science capabilities, in particular, are very much in demand by more sophisticated organizations and will step up the enterprise readiness of Zoho Analytics."
Based in Chennai, India, with a U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, Zoho is a longtime technology vendor that was known as AdventNet from 1996-2009. Initially, the vendor provided network management software before expanding to CRM, collaboration software and eventually analytics in 2009.
Zoho Analytics is available as a managed service on only Zoho's own cloud. However, customers can self-manage the platform using public clouds such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.
New capabilities
Ever since OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has been the dominant trend in analytics and data management.
By enabling true natural language processing for the first time, generative AI technology, when combined with an enterprise's proprietary data, enables any employee with an internet connection and the proper clearance to query and analyze data. Previously, given the complexity of data management and analytics platforms, only about a quarter of all employees within organizations had the requisite coding skills and data literacy training to engage in self-service analytics, much less data science and machine learning.
In addition, when trained to generate code on its own and automate repetitive tasks, generative AI can make data experts more efficient, freeing them from mundane tasks so they can do deeper analysis.
As a result, whether an analytics specialist such as MicroStrategy, a niche data management vendor like Monte Carlo that specializes in data observability, or a data platform vendor such as Google Cloud providing a broad array of analytics and data management capabilities, generative AI tools have dominated product development.
Zoho is no different.
The vendor, like many other analytics vendors, previously released an AI-powered assistant that enables customers to query and analyze data using natural language.
Now, Ask Zia has been improved to enable users to trigger actions and develop custom models using natural language. In addition, Ask Zia now works within Slack IM channels and Microsoft Teams to let customers derive insights without having to leave their collaboration environment and can be used to execute data transformation tasks without requiring code.
Beyond Ask Zia, new generative AI-powered features include the following:
Improvements to Zia Insights, an automated tool that surfaces insights and diagnoses problems, to now explain why things are happening rather than just what is happening.
Auto Analysis to automatically generate metrics, reports and dashboards.
An upgraded integration with OpenAI fueled by retrieval-augmented generation to provide more accurate and contextual responses to natural language queries.
The new generative AI capabilities are a focus of the vendor's platform update, according to Chandrashekar Lalapet Srinivas Prasanna – known as LSP -- managing director at Zoho Canada.
One of the vendor's goals is to bring AI to BI to make data easier to query and analyze so that more workers can use data to inform decisions. The new features, particularly the Zia Insights update, not only enable broader use but also add depth to what users could previously do with Zoho's generative AI tools, according to LSP.
"The idea is to get users to understand what is happening, give them insights, based on which they can make decisions," he said. "This is one of the biggest highlights of this particular release."
The other showpiece of the release is a new data science and machine learning (DSML) studio, according to LSP.
The new suite is designed to enable customers to simply and quickly build machine learning models within their analytics platform. Included features are AutoML, a no-code assistant that helps users during model development, and Code Studio, a Python coding environment for creating custom machine learning models as well as importing pre-existing Python models.
LSP noted that machine learning is often isolated from analytics. By including DSML in Zoho Analytics, the vendor's intent is to enable the use of analytics and machine learning in concert with one another. In addition, by including both a no-code set of tools and a code-first set of tools, Zoho aims to enable varied personae, from non-expert line-of-business users to data scientists, to benefit from the combination of BI and AI.
"The convergence [of AI and BI] is something that all organizations, and the industry in general, is moving toward," LSP said. "We're making self-service BI platforms have more developer capabilities. You want everything to be available in a business context. You want everything to be simple and easy and address the needs of all personas."
Like LSP, Henschen called out the DSML studio as one of the key new features included in Zoho's analytics platform update because it will let more users within organizations benefit from machine learning.
"Many organizations now want to go beyond descriptive and diagnostic analytics -- rear-view analysis of what happened and why," he said. "The DSML Studio will help Zoho Analytics users do more predictive analysis with AutoML capabilities or with support from data scientists or savvy analysts."
In addition to the DMSL studio, significant new capabilities include Ask Zia for data preparation and a new unified metrics layer within Zoho's Data Management Hub that enables customers to define and monitor business metrics, Henschen continued.
In total, the Zoho Analytics update includes more than 100 new and updated features.
A sample Zoho Analytics dashboard provides automatically generated insights to help users understand why sales are decreasing.
Looking ahead
With the latest Zoho Analytics platform update now complete, the vendor's roadmap includes developing a recommendation engine, according to LSP.
He noted that the update added decision intelligence capabilities in the form of automatically generated explanations to help users understand why something is happening. The next step is to provide suggestions for what to do next based on why something is happening.
"On the decision intelligence front, today we are making users make the decision," LSP said. "We want to provide recommendations. A recommendation engine is something in the cards."
In addition, while Zoho currently integrates with OpenAI, the vendor plans to develop integrations with other generative AI vendors to provide customers with more choice as they build generative AI capabilities.
Henschen, meanwhile, suggested that Zoho could launch data warehousing capabilities to compete with established vendors such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Snowflake. Just as Zoho Analytics provides a low-cost option for BI, the vendor could provide a low-cost data warehouse.
Zoho already provides data warehousing capabilities for Zoho Analytics and for Zoho's business applications, but the warehouse does not support data management and analytics tools from other vendors.
"I'd like to see Zoho introduce a low-cost alternative to the likes of Snowflake and Amazon Redshift that customers can manage and use for all their data," Henschen said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
