In business intelligence (BI), few companies have demonstrated the kind of long-term vision and innovation that Zoho Corp. has shown. Especially with its powerful analytics platform, Zoho Analytics. To get a deeper understanding of the company’s journey, product evolution, and insights into the future of analytics, we sat down with Clarence Rozario, Global Head of Zoho Analytics Business! With over 25 years at Zoho, Clarence has played a pivotal role in shaping the platform from its early days as Zoho Reports. Today, it stands as a GenAI-powered, self-service BI and analytics solution.
In this interview, Clarence Rozario shares how Zoho Analytics has evolved to meet the growing demands of modern businesses. He also discusses key trends in data and AI, and offers advice for organizations aiming to empower their teams with data-driven decision-making.
Clarence Rozario, the Global Head of Zoho Analytics Business, has been with Zoho Corp. for more than 25 years. In his career, Clarence has headed various product teams in Zoho like WebNMS, SwisSQL, Zoho Mobile, Zoho Search and Zoho Analytics. His experience spans across the areas of Network Management, Database Migration, Database and Content Search and Business Intelligence. His current focus is on Business Intelligence. He heads the Business Intelligence product suite, handling product management, technology adoption, and business development.
Hyperight: Having been on the market for over 15 years, how has Zoho Analytics‘ product strategy evolved, particularly in analytics and business intelligence?
Clarence Rozario: In 2009, we launched Zoho Reports as a simple yet powerful reporting tool that quickly gained market traction. The overwhelmingly positive response validated both our product vision and go-to-market strategies.
As we continued to invest in core analytical capabilities, Zoho Reports had a significant evolution—transforming into Zoho Analytics, a modern self-service BI and analytics platform.
This shift unlocked deeper insights for our users and empowered them to build tailored analytical solutions. It also enabled us to successfully enter the mid-market and enterprise segments, expanding our customer base and market footprint.
The addition of AI-powered insights and self-service data preparation, integration, and management capabilities—thanks to Zoho DataPrep—was a turning point. It allowed us to deepen our enterprise presence, create new opportunities across industries, and onboard a growing number of businesses.
In 2024, we integrated generative AI, data science, and machine learning capabilities, transforming Zoho Analytics into a comprehensive, GenAI-powered self-service BI and analytics platform. This leap not only attracted a new wave of customers but also unlocked expansion opportunities within our existing customer base.
The evolution of Zoho Analytics into a GenAI-first platform has been both challenging and exhilarating. What has set us apart is our commitment to staying close to our customers—listening, learning, and iterating alongside them. This proximity has allowed us to anticipate emerging needs and proactively build capabilities that keep our users ahead of the curve.
Hyperight: In a cut-throat BI market, what factors should organizations consider when choosing an ABI platform?
Clarence Rozario: Organizations should consider the following factors:
- Unified platform: A unified platform eliminates silos, ensures consistency, and streamlines the entire analytics workflow, empowering users with a seamless, end-to- end analytical experience.
- 360° business insights: The platform should have intelligent data modeling and blending across systems to provide end-to-end visibility into your operations, helping you make data-driven decisions across the board.
- AI-powered capabilities: Look for built-in advanced analytics through pretrained models and support for integrating your custom models. A modern platform should also offer GenAI capabilities, like copilots, smart recommendations, and automated insights.
- Ease of use: Usability is critical to drive organization-wide adoption. The platform should be intuitive, with a user-friendly interface that caters to both technical and non-technical users. Business users should be able to explore data, uncover insights, and build dashboards without heavy dependence on IT or data teams.
Hyperight: What key trends are emerging that you find most significant in the ABI market?
Clarence Rozario:
- Data velocity and diversity: The volume and velocity of data generation are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Industry reports suggest that the amount of business data created is nearly doubling each year. Alongside this surge is the rise in data diversity. Today’s businesses typically operate across 50 to 100 different applications, each producing a unique set of data—ranging from structured data to unstructured formats. Managing this growing complexity requires platforms that can seamlessly ingest, process, and unify data.
- Robust data management and governance: While collecting data is important, ensuring its quality and governance is critical. Without a trusted, high-quality data foundation, any downstream efforts—whether in analytics, AI, or reporting—are compromised. Effective data governance frameworks, combined with automated data quality and lineage tools, help organizations maintain trust in their data and ensure compliance, scalability, and long-term success.
- Strategic AI adoption: With more data, AI models become more accurate, reliable, and insightful. Businesses are increasingly adopting AI not only for advanced analytics (such as forecasting, anomaly detection, and recommendations) but also for GenAI applications. Strategic AI integration is rapidly becoming a key differentiator in deriving actionable value from data.
Hyperight: Zoho Analytics is known for its powerful data visualization capabilities. How do you balance advanced functionality with ease of use for non-technical users?
Clarence Rozario: We’ve consistently stayed ahead of the curve—continuously enhancing Zoho Analytics with sophisticated capabilities without compromising on usability. At the heart of this is our deep commitment to customer collaboration. The Zoho Analytics team works closely with a diverse range of users—from data analysts to business leaders—to understand their unique pain points, workflows, and goals. This hands-on engagement allows us to engineer advanced features tailored to specific roles, ensuring that complexity never comes at the cost of user experience.
Driven by a customer-first philosophy, we don’t just roll out features for the sake of functionality.
Instead, we focus on delivering solutions that directly address real-world challenges. Every enhancement is built with purpose, keeping the customer’s needs at our core.
What should IT and business leaders looking to enhance their analytics capabilities keep in mind?
- Understand GenAI and its transformational potential: GenAI is a game-changing technology that’s rapidly reshaping analytics. Begin by understanding its fundamentals: how it works, what it can do, and how it can be integrated into your business workflows. GenAI has the power to enhance user productivity, automate insight generation, and make analytics more accessible across your organization.
- Enable self-service analytics across teams: Empower your teams with a self-service BI platform that allows them to independently explore data, generate insights, and make informed decisions. Democratizing access to data reduces reliance on IT or data specialists and fosters a data-driven culture where decision-making is agile, informed, and aligned across all levels of the organization.
- Choose the right BI partner for long-term success: Your choice of BI platform and vendor plays a critical role in how successfully your organization embraces analytics. Partner with a vendor that is committed to innovation, understands your unique needs, and is willing to grow alongside you. The right vendor doesn’t just provide a product—they become a strategic partner in your analytics journey, helping you continuously unlock value from your data.
Zoho Analytics remains committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation in business intelligence. We continue to invest significantly in R&D to deliver a truly exceptional analytics experience, empowering businesses with deeper, more actionable insights. Our resources and strategic investments are meticulously aligned to meet the evolving analytical needs of organizations across industries and sizes.
As the BI landscape shifts toward greater automation and intelligence, we’re raising the bar with bold advancements in the agentic BI space. Expect major updates this year as we reimagine the future of analytics with smarter, more intuitive capabilities.
About Zoho Analytics: Zoho Analytics, a GenAI-powered, self-service BI & analytics platform with transformative capabilities, helps organizations derive maximum value from their data assets. With sophisticated AI capabilities built into the platform, Zoho Analytics puts the power of data analytics into the hands of all BI personas. The platform offers diverse possibilities for infusing BI and analytics into existing business workflows, and it has a proven track record of providing best-in-class analytics solutions at a minimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
Zoho Corp. will be joining us as a partner at the Data Innovation Summit APAC 2025. The event will take place on 12 June.
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