Techaisle Blog

In today's data-driven landscape, organizations grapple with myriad challenges stemming from the increasing volume, velocity, and complexity of data. These challenges encompass data governance and management, the need for predictive and prescriptive analytics, the democratization of insights, and the rapid pace of technological advancements. To address these complexities, Zoho has introduced a new AI-powered self-service BI and analytics platform.

Since 2009, Zoho has been a prominent BI and analytics platform player, offering a robust foundation for data management and preparation. Zoho's self-service analytics platform is highly versatile and capable of running on Zoho's cloud, third-party clouds, or on-premises. Furthermore, Zoho caters to the embedded market, enabling third-party applications to leverage its analytics capabilities for insights within their business tools. As of the end of 2023, Zoho serves a substantial customer base of 17,000 directly paying organizations for Zoho Analytics, with over 70,000 businesses utilizing Zoho Analytics daily, embedded as part of any other Zoho apps. While Zoho One is widely recognized as its flagship suite of applications, the widespread adoption of Zoho Analytics within Zoho One, second only to Zoho CRM, across customer and employee experience applications, finance, marketing, and low-code applications, underscores its simplicity, reliability, and value.

Zoho Analytics is a powerful tool that offers both descriptive and prescriptive capabilities, enabling businesses to extract valuable insights and make informed decisions. Its descriptive features allow users to delve into historical data, understand past business trends, and identify key drivers. On the other hand, its prescriptive capabilities, driven by machine learning and AI, provide actionable recommendations to tackle specific business challenges. This includes features like decision intelligence, which assists users in understanding the root causes of certain events and how to respond effectively. By integrating these two types of analytics, Zoho Analytics not only helps businesses comprehend their past performance but also guides them in making proactive decisions to enhance future outcomes.

Let us explore why Zoho is emerging as a market differentiator in AI-powered self-service BI and analytics platforms. Its unique blend of features and capabilities makes it a compelling choice for organizations seeking to harness the power of data-driven insights.

Data Velocity and Diversity - A Modern Challenge

In today's digital age, organizations rely on many applications to manage their operations, resulting in a deluge of data. With modern enterprises often utilizing over 100 applications, the volume and variety of data generated are staggering, encompassing both structured and unstructured formats. To address this challenge, Zoho offers a comprehensive data management hub that provides a solid foundation for organizations to handle their data effectively. Zoho's platform excels in data integration, supporting over 500 data sources and facilitating real-time stream processing. This enables businesses to extract data from cloud data warehouses, files, feeds, and other unstructured sources seamlessly. Moreover, Zoho's commitment to innovation is evident in its ongoing expansion of data connectors, with plans to add 25 more soon. The platform's ability to process data in real-time from systems like Kafka, PubNub, or Cloud PubSub empowers organizations to efficiently collect and analyze data from diverse sources, regardless of their structure or format.

If connected cloud is the logical starting point for discussing the essential elements of a connected business platform, connected insights is the discussion’s logical destination. In today's highly competitive business environment, the significance of data has increased exponentially for most types of enterprises, including midmarket organizations and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, organizations often need help to harness data effectively to achieve desired business outcomes, mainly due to their lack of readiness for analytics. To address this issue, Qlik offers a comprehensive suite of real-time data integration and analytics solutions that seamlessly connect data, insights, and actions.

With over 40,000 active clients, of which 25,000+ are mid-sized businesses, Qlik offers an easy-to-use platform that allows business users to analyze data, gain insights, and make data-driven decisions. It empowers companies to unlock growth opportunities and optimize operations by seamlessly integrating diverse data sources and customizable analytics applications. Moreover, as organizations grow, Qlik's scalable solution can seamlessly handle mounting volumes and complexities of data analysis, making it suitable for midmarket clients and SMBs. Additionally, the company’s capacity pricing model is designed to be affordable, allowing organizations with limited resources to leverage the full potential of its robust analytics capabilities.

Techaisle’s latest research shows that analytics is a top priority for SMBs, with 73% of SMBs, 92% of core midmarket firms, and 99% of upper midmarket firms prioritizing it. In 54% of organizations, IT and business users struggle to manage data growth, while in 59%, IT and data analysts focus on data integration. Developing an ‘evidence-based culture’ is critical in using analytics to achieve business objectives. 39% of firms are working towards enabling a data-driven decision-making culture. Given this data, Techaisle believes that Qlik is well-positioned to meet the needs of midmarket firms.

Data literacy is as crucial in today’s workforce as reading and writing were during the Industrial Revolution. Qlik provides a wide range of free data literacy resources, including various courses available through a consortium with other companies. For organizations looking to enhance their employees’ skills, Qlik offers tailored programs designed in collaboration with Chief Data Officers.

QLIK: DELIVERING DATA TO INSIGHTS TO ACTIONS TO FORESIGHT

The availability of various data sources makes gaining a unified and comprehensive view of a business complex, and integrating data from diverse systems and formats is incredibly challenging for SMBs and midmarket enterprises with limited resources. Recognizing this challenge, Qlik provides a solution that empowers organizations to conduct cross-functional analyses, unveiling hidden insights and correlations that may otherwise remain concealed in data silos.

Techaisle’s most recent survey data shows that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to increase by 79% within small businesses, 63% in core-midmarket firms, and 53% in upper-midmarket firms. AI has become a priority for 41% of small businesses, 75% of core-midmarket firms, and 79% of upper-midmarket firms. ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently become the topic of conversations and business usage. When ChatGPT comes up in conversation – especially a discussion focusing on SMBs – the first question will likely be, “How many organizations are using it – and how?” Techaisle extended its artificial intelligence survey to pose the same question to 1872 SMBs. Both small and midmarket businesses forecast a substantial rise in the use of ChatGPT in the next one year. 17% of small businesses, 39% of core midmarket firms, and 79% of upper midmarket firms plan to use systems/tools/other products that embed ChatGPT. Results indicate that ChatGPT penetration within the midmarket, driven primarily by firms with more than 250 employees, will be reasonably robust. However, Techaisle feels that the planned adoption data is likely conservative.

Coding is not everyone's inclination, yet there is a need to rapidly automate new workflows, generate new insights from scattered datasets, drive competitive advantage, improve customer interactions and make operational improvements. Low-code/no-code platforms such as Quickbase, Airtable, Microsoft Power platform, and Salesforce Lightning aim to equip and empower business users to be self-sufficient and agile to achieve their business objectives. But Zoho Creator Platform is different. It effortlessly enables both business and IT users to pursue their individual interests and is very well suited for the SMB and midmarket segments. It replaces the band-aiding of work processes with a permanent yet elastic fix to improve organizational efficiency. Business users can spin up applications. If IT needs to add additional complexity, the IT team can develop that through custom capabilities. Developers can write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in the Zoho Creator Platform using Deluge or Java or Node.js. These functions encourage IT and business teams to work together to build scalable and easily maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster. Developers can now launch solutions in different environments of choice—development, staging, or production, with a single click based on the application's readiness.

Most people associate Low-code with spreadsheet replacement, email replacement, automating, and digitizing them. Instead, the Zoho Creator Platform aims to help recreate processes to leverage everything a local platform can do in mobile, analytics, and governance.

Zoho Creator was introduced 15 years ago as an online database. Its latest version, Zoho Creator Platform, announced on March 3, 2022, aims to empower everyone to build applications solutions with a unified platform quickly. Specifically in the SMB and midmarket firms, IT is overloaded and has less time to codify new processes and modernize existing ones. Regardless, most organizations do not have well-defined business processes and want flexibility.