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, remains privately held and is led by co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu. Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho currently has two other offices in India as well as sites in the United States (two offices), China, Mexico, Australia, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan and Singapore. The company employs around 9,000 people.
Across its suite of over 45 business applications – which includes solutions for CRM, project management, book keeping, human resource management, analytics, marketing and support – Zoho claims to have 60 million users worldwide.
Zoho Analytics is the BI component of the Zoho business suite, and was first released in 2009. With Zoho Analytics, the vendor aims to provide unified business analytics to its customers. Zoho Analytics supplies a number of different connectors to data sources which can be integrated in a central data model designed for use by business users. Business connectors (for Zoho & 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.
Zoho Analytics can be used as a self-service BI platform hosted on Zoho cloud and be embedded in third-party applications. It can also be deployed on-premises and on third-party cloud infrastructures such as Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Zoho’s recently released 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.
User & Use Cases
Zoho Analytics is a dashboards, reporting and analysis tool targeted at business users. 76 percent of Zoho Analytics respondents use the product for dashboards and an almost equal portion of users (74 percent) use it for standard/enterprise reporting. This focus on information delivery can be understood when looking at the departments our survey respondents came from: about a third of all responses from Zoho Analytics users came from management, while one fifth came from IT, 10 percent from finance and a further 10 percent from other departments.
Zoho Analytics’ generally strong adoption by business users is reflected in above-average results for report and dashboard creation. About half of all Zoho Analytics respondents said that they use the product for analysis and ad hoc query tasks.
Zoho Analytics is strongly represented by small and mid-sized companies in this year’s survey. 74 percent of respondents came from businesses with less than 100 employees. The median number of users per company is 4 and the mean is 19.
Current vs. planned use
N=31
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Zoho Analytics
N=39
Percentage of employees using Zoho Analytics
N=34
Number of users using Zoho Analytics
N=34
Tasks carried out with Zoho Analytics by business users
N=34
Company size (number of employees)
N=34
Summary of Zoho Analytics highlights
Zoho Analytics buyers seem to be quite a demanding group of business users who are looking for easy-to-use, flexible and affordable software. Cloud also seems to be a key requirement. Customers use dashboards and reports but also create their own individual reports as needed. The vendor offers predefined dashboards and reports for various data sources to help customers speed up their implementations and begin analyzing their data quickly. This seems to work out well as the vendor achieved an excellent score of 9.8/10 in the Project Length KPI.
Ease of Use – Top-ranked
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Mobile BI – Leader
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Operational BI – Leader
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Project Length – Top-ranked
Peer group: Embedded Analytics-focused Products
Consistently outstanding in Project Length
Peer group: Embedded Analytics-focused Products
Want to see the whole picture?
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.
Contact us to purchase the Vendor Performance Summary- Register for a free sample Vendor Performance Summary download
- If you have any questions, feel free to contact us
