ManageEngine announced the general availability of Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, in its IT analytics solution, Analytics Plus.

Zia interprets questions posed in plain English via text or voice to generate visualizations instantly, and offers smart suggestions based on keywords used in search. Users can also train Zia to understand organization-specific terms to get better results.

IT teams, armed with analytics tools, are often so engrossed in firefighting network alarms or dealing with help desk incidents that they don't have time to analyze historical data and find opportunities for process improvement. Organizations that do make time for such analysis rely heavily on database administrators to mine relevant data and present it in a readable format. In both cases, by the time IT teams get their hands on critical information, it may be too late for the business to react to a threat or identify an opportunity. With a conversational AI assistant built into their IT analytics tool, anyone in an organization — from CTOs and network operations center (NOC) teams to help desk managers, technicians, and support engineers—can quickly access the IT data they need, regardless of technical expertise.

"IT managers need access to instant insights that they can continue to refine and drill down into, without relying on database administrators. Zia makes it possible for non-technical users to analyze data without having to write SQL queries or programs, saving precious time that can be used to focus on improving the quality of IT services offered," said Rakesh Jayaprakash, Product Manager at ManageEngine. "In the future, we look forward to expanding the analytical capabilities of Zia to perform seamless data blending and provide automated insights."
Zia, Intuitive AI for ITSM Analytics

In a world where voice-automated assistants are revolutionizing our daily lives, Zia takes self-service analytics to the next level. By eliminating the drag-and-drop rigmarole involved in most self-service analytics solutions, Zia makes it easy for users to analyze data, empowering them to spot trends, perform root cause analysis, and make game-changing decisions swiftly, simply by asking the right questions.

Zia can perform a wide variety of tasks such as:

- Create insightful KPIs and reports based on user questions.

- Prompt keyword suggestions as users type or speak.

- Continuously learn and adapt to user requirements by analyzing recent searches.

Redefining Proactive Service Desk Operations Using Predictive Analysis

Alongside Zia, ManageEngine released predictive analytics in Analytics Plus, a new feature that aims to help NOC and service desk teams get out of firefighting mode. NOC teams can leverage Analytics Plus' predictive algorithms to anticipate service outages and network or application failures, as well as plan stop-gap measures, while service desk teams can foresee daily, weekly, and monthly ticket volumes and reorganize their workforce to avoid SLA violations.

Using predictive analysis, service desk managers can:

- Predict the probability of service outages and volume of incident tickets.

- Monitor technician and asset utilization in real time and allocate resources when needed.

- Anticipate security threats to better plan patch deployment across the enterprise.

Zia and predictive analytics are both available at no additional cost in Analytics Plus.