Software firm Zoho recently announced the release of Zoho Analytics 4.0, its most advanced self-service business intelligence and analytics platform yet. The new release features the power of big data, enabling organizations to analyze massive amounts of data in a much more efficient way and derive critical business insights.

“The Business Intelligence market is evolving towards self-service and intelligence-driven analytics,” said Gibu Mathew, vice president, and general manager, Asia-Pacific, Zoho Corp. “The new release of Zoho Analytics further propels this trend by introducing AI-powered insights and collaborative decision-making.”

Zoho is the operating system for business — a single online platform capable of running an entire business.

“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.”

New capabilities

Enhanced Visualization: Zoho Analytics 4.0 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.

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 query Zia with questions such as: ‘What was my monthly sales for the last year across regions?’ and receive answers in the form of visual reports, without having to create them manually.

Forecasting: Zoho Analytics 4.0 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 prebuilt 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 heads: Zoho People analytics

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 insights across multiple departments like marketing, sales, support, finance and others, all at one place, without having to switch applications.

Collaborative Analysis: Zoho Analytics 4.0 strengthens its existing collaborative capabilities with contextual commenting. Users can now comment on any report or dashboard, thereby interacting with the stakeholders in the right context.

Smart Data Alerts: Zoho Analytics alerts users via in-app notifications or email when an anomaly is detected so that appropriate action can be taken. For example, a sharp drop in sales or an abnormal increase in support tickets will trigger an alert.

On-premise: In addition to the existing cloud version, Zoho Analytics 4.0 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.