AI and analytics? Been there, done that
In a recent article, I covered a discussion I’d previously had with a company called Luzmo that enables SaaS players to more easily build advanced analytics capabilities into their solutions. This was in response to me hearing time and again about business user frustrations with the inconsistencies between SaaS solutions in the level of analytics capability offered.
While some providers have done a very good job in delivering a great analytics experience, e.g. through comprehensive tailorable dashboards and intuitive query and reporting interfaces, others still deliver a rudimentary set of capabilities, starving users of the data and insights they need.
There are then some larger players who throw multiple analytics environments at users that have originated from different generations of their technology or the various companies they have acquired over the years. And to make matters worse, we’ve seen many companies rush to incorporate generative AI into the mix as if it were some kind of silver bullet. Too often this has simply resulted in user confusion, distraction and disappointment, not to mention misleading output.
Against this background, a number of questions occurred to us when my colleague Tony
Lock and I tuned into a briefing by Zoho on the launch of the latest version of its business analytics offering.
Before getting into that, though, it’s worth recapping our view of Zoho and how its approach differs from many other players.
Contrasting philosophies
We’ve always found Zoho an interesting company to watch. Arguably best known for its CRM offering that has attracted a loyal worldwide following over the years, the company’s portfolio is actually much broader than that. Today, it covers solutions including accounting, HR, digital workspace, email and operational automation capabilities, plus, of course the aforementioned business analytics solution.
Something that’s always stood out to us is Zoho’s vertically integrated platform philosophy, which it sees as key to providing a consistent user experience. Unlike some other vendors, it’s not constantly buying up other companies and stitching new things into the existing environment, which, as we wrote a while back, can lead to unhelpful complexity and confusing functional redundancy. Zoho prefers to spend more on R&D, develop as much as possible in-house, and deploy the same reusable components across its application suite – one set of document editors, one set of analytics functions, and so on.
To be clear, however, this focus on integration and consistency doesn’t mean that Zoho has built an old-fashioned ERP-style monolith. While it’s always looking to deliver that consistent cross-suite experience, specific capability sets are also packaged up as discrete offerings. Many customers, for example, use Zoho Analytics as a stand alone solution, independently of other Zoho applications.
But what about innovation?
The vertically integrated approach, with its emphasis on in-house design and development, allows Zoho to retain full control of its platform, but it does beg the question of how well the company is able to keep up from an innovation perspective. There’s a theoretical answer to this, in that building something from the ground up is often better than acquiring something that jars with your existing architectural and UI standards. With the acquisition approach, any time-to-market advantage has to be offset by the potential blow-back from customers who suffer the pain of the half-baked integrations.
The other answer to the innovation question in Zoho’s case is simply the company’s track record. The business analytics solution is a good test case here that we got to explore with Clarence Rozario, Director of Product Management for Zoho’s Analytics Suite.
In response to our question on innovation, Rozario responded: “Yes, our philosophy has always been to deliver a vertically integrated platform with a consistent experience, but that has not curtailed us from being innovative or market leading in many areas. For example, we launched a complete cloud based BI service in 2009, when the whole space was still defined by on-premise applications. Then in 2018, we launched Ask Zia, our Natural Language assistant (copilot), way before AI became fashionable”.
On more recent innovations, Rozario went on to say: “In our latest release, we’ve launched capabilities like workflow based alerting, our new ‘Data Science and Machine Learning Studio’, prebuilt diagnostic analysis in a narrative format, and a no-code connector builder. These developments address emerging customer needs that we think it’s important to get ahead of.”
All of this is clearly highly-relevant for organisations looking to implement enterprise data driven AI systems. But we wanted to get more of a feel for how Zoho thinks about customer requirements and prioritises its investments.
Empathy and balance matter
As we continued to talk innovation with Rozario, it became clear that the approach is not to follow the latest industry trends and hype, but to continuously listen to customers and anticipate their needs. The idea is that by the time the market catches up, Zoho will already have solid foundations in place and proven customer experience under its belt. As Rozario says in relation to natural language support: “We had already done a lot of work figuring out where the real value of AI lies in an analytics context, and how to deal with the risks of using corporate data together with AI-enabled systems.”
That said, Rozario still advocates caution and discipline: “We’ve learned to resist the temptation to rush things. We move at a pace that makes sense for both Zoho and our customers. It’s always about delivering value, not just ticking boxes.”
This topic of release cadence led to an interesting discussion on how Zoho balances innovation with stability. Rozario emphasised the importance of the company’s component-based architecture and engineering discipline: “Our approach allows us to innovate continuously without disrupting the user experience. We can introduce new capabilities in a way that’s natural and intuitive for our users. It’s not about forcing change, but about evolving the product in line with user needs.”
He went on to explain Zoho’s empathetic roll-out philosophy: “We’re very conscious of the fact that innovation, if ill-thought-through, can actually undermine user productivity and satisfaction. It’s hard to recover from an initial bad experience with a new technology.”
Bottom line
It should go without saying that AI is not a silver bullet in any of its forms – it needs to be applied thoughtfully and in context if it’s going to add value and be fully embraced by users. From a solution evaluation perspective it’s therefore important to beware of application vendors that are simply jumping onto the AI bandwagon to tick the ‘me too’ box. The risk is that in their rush to get to market, they may not have fully evaluated the value, the risks, and, as importantly, the impact on user experience.
Against this background, while we can’t make specific solution recommendations, Rozario’s open and honest perspective suggests Zoho is one of the more responsible players out there at the moment. We’ll therefore be watching its progress with AI enhanced analytics with interest.