Zoho Corporation began life in 1996 as 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 remains privately held.
Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho currently has additional 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 15,000 people.
Its business application suite covers BI & analytics, CRM, project management, accounting, human resource management, marketing and support. Zoho currently serves more than 17,000 customers worldwide with its BI & analytics platform.
Zoho Analytics, first released in 2009, is the central BI & analytics platform in Zoho’s portfolio. With Zoho Analytics, the vendor provides unified data management and 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 can automatically identify and map table relationships, create domain and cross-domain models, train the NLQ engine and create sample reports and dashboards to speed up implementation of BI & analytics. Customers can access these models using APIs.
Zoho further serves business users with its natural language assistant Zia. Users can ask questions using ‘Ask Zia’ and analyze the underlying data without the need to create new content. Moreover, with Zia Insights, the software offers natural language generation (NLG) to provide in-depth information about displayed data and help business users to interpret it. Zoho Analytics is also integrated with Zoho Cliq to provide chat-like collaboration capabilities.
Zoho Analytics can be used as a self-service BI & analytics platform and can 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 GCP, AWS or Azure. Its pluggable micro services architecture for public cloud deployments offers the flexibility to use third-party components such as AWS caching instead of those offered by Zoho.
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.
