A new artificial intelligence- (AI-) driven data analytics solution is designed to empower businesses to surface precise and actionable insights through self-service data preparation and augmented analytics.

The end-to-end self-service BI Platform, which combines a newly-launched augmented self-service data preparation and pipeline service, aims to enable organisations to cleanse, unify and analyse cross-departmental data, obtain an encyclopaedic view of the company and help businesses move toward a more competitive business strategy based on real-time insights.

Global technology company Zoho Corporation announced that its new BI Platform brings together pre-built, visual dashboards, comprehensive data integrations, data preparation, augmented and embedded BI, security and privacy capabilities, flexible deployment models (cloud or on-premise) and scalability.

"For data to be a true catalyst of business growth, there can't be any gaps in the collection, management or analysis process," said Zoho Corporation regional manager Africa Andrew Bourne. "Too few BI platforms in the market excel in both data preparation and analytics, which leaves businesses with weak – or worse, flawed – insights. Zoho's BI Platform is industry-leading because it ensures organisations are acting on legitimate data, which can be effectively leveraged to determine new revenue streams, refocus funds, drive productivity, and overall gain a competitive edge among peers in their market."

The BI platform aims to allow businesses to perform better and remain competitive in their industries and features the following four main pillars:

• Augmented data preparation (prep) and management: Zoho DataPrep is an AI and machine learning-driven self-service data preparation tool. The addition of the new application to the BI Platform is said to allow businesses to easily create and manage data pipelines that enable users to integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich and catalogue data before making it ready for analysis.
• Data stories: The BI Platform offers an integrated enterprise portal builder (Zoho Sites) and presentation software (Zoho Show). Embedding live reports and dashboards into a website or presentation allows administrators to wrap additional context around data and foster more immersive discussion on business matters. Data Stories aims to reduce friction within an organization, so that businesses can be data-driven without needing to learn new tools.
• Augmented analytics: Zoho's conversational AI, ‘Ask Zia’, enables business users to surface data through natural language querying. In addition, Zia Insights provides textual narration of key insights from reports and dashboards that help to reduce the time and effort required to explore data and glean insights. Zia Insights also includes ‘what-if’ capability, enabling scenario analysis for effective decision-making.
• Marketplace: Through Zoho Marketplace, an applications (apps) marketplace, the company aims to enable partners to develop and publish analytical apps and integrations to complement Zoho Analytics users, to strengthen the BI and analytics platform. Deep native analytical apps, with domain-specific advanced analytics, have also been launched in third-party marketplaces such as Shopify, ServiceNow and Atlassian.

The new Zoho BI Platform is built for scale and is extensible to more than 250 data sources including Zendesk, HubSpot, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Stripe and Google, allowing businesses to integrate and analyse data sourced from diverse third-party systems.