If data is the new oil, modern data management platforms such as Zoho are its refinery. In a world where companies struggle with extracting value from data, the newest iteration of Zoho Analytics aims to make data more accessible and actionable for businesses worldwide.
“The beauty is we have a common data model where everything maps into,” said Chandrashekar LSP, managing director at Zoho Corp. Pvt. Ltd. “We help organizations with an analytics journey because all that you had to do was connect to your business application, be it a CRM or a projects tool. And then we automatically create the data model for analysis. We automatically create reports, charts and dashboards. That whole experience in terms of how organizations can get to insights and how fast they can get to it is indeed a differentiator in terms of the offering.”
LSP spoke with theCUBE Research Principal Analyst Shelly Kramer, during a AnalystANGLE segment on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Zoho meeting the demand for predictive and prescriptive analytics by offering diagnostic insights in real-time and removing the guesswork from decision-making.
Data management: Today’s enterprise challenges
Today’s organizations primarily face three problems in their data insights journey. The first is data velocity and diversity.
Companies now run on over a hundred different applications, each generating its own data set. Managing these various data streams — from transactional to unstructured data — can be overwhelming. The growing need to process real-time data adds another layer of complexity. Zoho Analytics offers over 500 data source integrations, including new partnerships with Oracle NetSuite, monday.com and Qualtrics, to help organizations streamline and unify data, according to LSP.
“You can bring in streaming data, think of data from sensors, you can bring it into the analytics layer and start creating the reports,” he said. “And then apart from that, there’s integration with Databricks and other such in our cloud data providers.”
The next challenge is data quality. Companies often struggle with refining raw data and ensuring it’s accurate and ready for analysis. Zoho’s new data preparation tools make this easier by enabling users to create data pipelines visually. The platform also introduces a natural language processing feature through its AI engine, Ask Zia, to help users clean and manage data more intuitively, according to LSP.
“DataStudio always did support the ability to process data and cleanse data, but then it was a point-and-click function,” he said. “But now we have made it very visual. We’ve also introduced a natural language layer to process the data and cleanse the data. You don’t have to necessarily use point-and-click and visual representation.”
The third pain point is adoption and accessibility. Organizations often struggle with making analytics accessible to all relevant stakeholders. Zoho addresses this by embedding its AI-powered tools into popular business workflows. For example, users can query data and generate reports within Microsoft Teams without switching between platforms, according to LSP.
“Any question or interaction that you want to have with the data is going to happen in the context of your conversation with your colleague,” he said. “Let’s say you’re talking to your finance department and then you want to pull up some reports. In the context of Teams, you can be right there and then say, ‘Show me the revenue forecast for the next three months,’ and boom, what’s going to happen is you’re going to see a report even as you’re chatting with your finance team.”
The new Data Management Hub: A game changer
A key update to Zoho’s overall platform is its Data Management Hub. Alongside data integration and support for Google Cloud and Kafka, there’s also enhanced data pipeline management, with a visual pipeline builder that allows users to easily create workflows for data preparation, cleansing and transformation, ensuring that data is ready for analysis.
Another key improvement is the Metrics Store. This feature allows organizations to create predefined metrics, such as win rates or average deal closing times, for specific business units. Business users can then access these pre-defined metrics instead of combing through raw data, making it easier for them to derive insights without having to be data management experts, according to LSP.
“When the data is prepared by the data engineer or the data expert, do you want to just give access to this cleaned-up, raw data to the business user or would you much rather create a set of metrics that are relevant for specific business plans?”, he said.
These metrics can be embedded directly into operational tools such as CRM systems. This means users don’t need to navigate to Zoho Analytics to access data — they can see key metrics within their existing workflows, significantly improving efficiency, LSP added.
Here’s the complete SecurityANGLE segment with Chandrashekar LSP: