Zoho Corporation began life in 1996 as a software company called Adventnet, Inc., which focused on building network management products. The company was renamed in 2009 and now operates three distinct divisions including Zoho, which develops and sells a suite of business applications. Zoho Corporation has never accepted venture capital investment and remains privately held.
Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho currently has two other offices in India as well as sites in the United States, China, Mexico, Australia, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan and Singapore. The company employs around 12,000 people.
The Zoho suite currently consists of over 45 business applications, including solutions for CRM, project management, accounting, human resource management, BI and analytics, marketing and support. The company claims to have more than 14,000 customers worldwide for its BI and analytics platform.
Zoho Analytics, first released in 2009, is the central BI and analytics platform in Zoho’s portfolio. With Zoho Analytics, the vendor aims to provide unified business analytics to its customers. It supplies a large number of connectors to data sources which can be integrated in a central data model designed for use by business users. Business connectors (for Zoho and non-Zoho apps) are able to auto-identify and auto-map table relationships, create domain and cross-domain models, train the NLQ engine and create sample reports and dashboards to speed up implementations for analytics. Customers can access these models using APIs.
Zoho Analytics can be used as a self-service BI platform and be embedded in Zoho’s own or third-party applications. It can be deployed on-premises, on Zoho Cloud and on third-party cloud infrastructures such as Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Zoho’s Data Prep solution provides business analysts with an appealing and intuitive user interface for data ingestion and wrangling combined with guidance for possible preparation steps. Sophisticated data profiling features add value for customers when preparing data, decisively speeding up the identification and correction of issues in data.
User & Use Cases
Zoho Analytics is well used across a spread of different departments, and not necessarily always the ‘typical’ ones such as finance and management. Zoho Analytics buyers are attracted to the affordable solution targeted at business users, which will help them solve data management issues and perform a wide variety of tasks. Customer use the product for dashboards (67 percent) and reports (63 percent) as well as analysis (48 percent) and ad hoc query (43 percent).
68 percent of our sample of Zoho Analytics customers came from smaller companies with less than 100 employees. The median number of users per company is 5 and the mean is 137. Use of the product is well distributed across several departments and it is used by an above-average percentage of employees compared to its competitors. This indicates that the product is not only used in strategic BI areas and departments but also by operational staff to support daily work.
Current vs. planned use
n=52
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Zoho Analytics
n=63
Percentage of employees using Zoho Analytics
n=61
Number of users using Zoho Analytics
n=61
Tasks carried out with Zoho Analytics by business users
n=63
Company size (number of employees)
n=62
Summary of Zoho Analytics highlights
The BI & Analytics Survey results for Zoho Analytics this year make for interesting reading. It seems that customers who have implemented the software want a business-user-oriented solution to help them solve data-related tasks such as data preparation and visualization. Over 90 percent of the respondents to this survey are satisfied with its report and dashboard creation capabilities, ad hoc query creation and analyses capabilities and functions for distributing reports. Moreover, about 80 percent are happy with its data preparation and advanced analytics features. Customers also reported having achieved a number of benefits through using the software. The very short median implementation time of 2 months definitely helps customers to make quick wins on their BI and analytics projects.
Advanced Analytics – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Midsize/Departmental Implementations
Consistently outstanding in Business Benefits
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Distribution of Reports – Leader
Peer Group: Business Software Generalists
Functionality – Leader
Peer Group: Business Software Generalists
Project Length – Leader
Peer Group: Embedded Analytics Focus
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BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from Zoho Analytics users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
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