Roadmap to Yellowfin 6.1: Responding to the consumerization of BI

Yellowfin: Strategic direction

Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie, said Yellowfin had worked diligently to earn the right to lay legitimate claim to being the world’s easiest to use, manage, integrate and embed BI solution. Rabie also noted that independent recognition over the past six to 12 months had played a significant role in Yellowfin’s growing reputation as a market-leading provider of Mobile BI, Collaborative BI, Location Intelligence (LI) and data visualization. Rabie said that Yellowfin’s established core product values would remain the focus for 6.1.

“Yellowfin is a new-age BI vendor on the rise and our solution now reflects that,” said Rabie. “Recent independent research has continued to validate the internal belief we have in our product, and alignment with Wayne Eckerson’s soon-to-be-released research report into Collaborative BI will further strengthen our credibility in the market.”

Indeed over the past several months, Yellowfin’s key product strengths have been recognized via a number of notable reports and awards.
 

Mobile BI
Dresner Advisory Services’ (DAS) latest global Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study again recognized Yellowfin as a leader in Mobile BI, awarding the vendor the second highest score the second consecutive year. Rabie noted that the result “confirms that our consumer-oriented and collaborative approach to Mobile BI is a winning strategy”. Gartner’s most recent Who’s Who of Mobile BI report also acknowledges Yellowfin’s mobile capabilities, praising the vendor for its ability to “deliver native applications for iOS and Android tablets and smartphones out of the box with no additional cost for existing users.”

Location Intelligence
Late last year, Yellowfin was announced the Ventana Research 2011 Leadership Award Winner for LI. The awards recognized the Yellowfin and Macquarie University BI implementation as the best 2010/11 worldwide example of LI and the most likely to produce significant business value heading into 2012.

Easy-to-use BI
Further, DAS’ newest Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study put Yellowfin amongst the world’s elite BI vendors, with the global study scoring the vendor particularly strongly on critical ease-of-use criteria, including ease of administration, overall usability, ease of installation and third-party integration.

Ventana’s Menninger on Yellowfin: Intuitive, collaborative, mobile
And, Ventana Research’s esteemed analyst and Research Director, David Menninger, responded to the launch of Yellowfin 6 by stating that: “If you are looking for a user-friendly tool with collaborative and mobile capabilities that I refer to as the next generation of BI software, take a look at Yellowfin”.

Rabie stated that Yellowfin 6.1 would further the firm’s position as “a BI vendor responding to the consumerization of BI and enterprise IT at large.” He said that Yellowfin would continue to meet these goals by “continuing to deliver world-class reporting and analytics in highly consumable formats that users actually love. Dresner’s latest wisdom of crowds study is clear evidence of that, as 100 percent of survey respondents said that they would recommend Yellowfin to others.”

Yellowfin 6.1: Continuing to build a BI solution that business and IT love

“Our first goal when developing Yellowfin is to build a solution that people love to use,” said Rabie. “So that includes developing Yellowfin’s User Interface, but also a product that people can engage with at an emotional level – a product that users love to interact with, and that IT love to manage.”

Yellowfin 6.1: Ease-of-use will remain key in the face of the consumerization of BI

“We believe, and research indicates, that if you have a BI tool that is easy-to-use and derive knowledge from, user adoption rates will rise,” said Rabie. “Having higher user adoption leads to a higher Return on Investment.

“Ease-of-use surpassed product functionality in Gartner’s 2011 and 2012 Magic Quadrant for BI surveys as the number one purchasing criteria for any BI solution. This really does emphasize the shift away from the developer-centric type of BI deployments. Business users are having an increasingly large say in BI purchase decisions, as organizations begin to realize the benefits of widespread BI deployments – deployments far beyond the IT department.”

Yellowfin 6.1: The major developments

Having explained the philosophy and direction underpinning Yellowfin’s ongoing and iterative product development, Rabie provided a window into the notable specific additions and enhancements set to characterize Yellowfin 6.1. Major talking points include: