Yellowfin leads the new players in taking business intelligence mainstream.

(Association Press) - Get ready for the next wave of business
intelligence, which will once and for all take BI mainstream, with query, reporting, and analysis dashboards on every desktop. According to Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin "We are experiencing a new wave of investment in BI by organisations in all industries. The current market cycle is expected to last until 2020 and will be focused on expanding the reach of BI to more users both inside and outside the organization and a move to automate more decision processes by combining query, reporting and analysis and advanced analytics functionality."

The evolving market is rapidly attracting new software vendors to challenge the established players. Underlying the growth is the demand for BI to become more mainstream, companies are looking for alternatives to premium priced products. Leading the new pack is Yellowfin, offering web based reporting that allows companies to standardise BI across the enterprise, while providing easy and creative ways for frontline and non-traditional BI users to access information from transactional and warehouse systems.

"BI for the masses suffers the same problems that currently plague BI for analysts and power users, unless software vendors change their approach. What we have today are traditional BI tools that don't work nearly as well as they should, even for analysts and power users. The reason they haven't reached the masses is because most of the tools are so difficult to use and reveal so little about the data that only power users are willing to put up with them. Just as Google redefined the internet by making search and therefore access to it easy ... the same is true with the BI suite. Lowering the price is one thing and we are starting to see that. However, usability and relevance are the key things that need to be addressed", says Rabie.

Unlike traditional tools Yellowfin is making BI easy. Yellowfin supports wider distribution across the organisation through ease of use, ease of deployment and ease of integration into production applications. "What we have done at Yellowfin, is to start with a clean slate. Rather than look at where technology has taken BI products today we have a vision for where they should be tomorrow," says Justin Hewitt, COO. "Our focus has been on the user experience - let the technology do the hard work behind the scenes, and make BI easy for the user."

Chris Hocking from Plumbing World was attracted to Yellowfin because it is completely platform-independent, which suited Plumbing World's mixed platform environment. However, when he began a trial of the software Hocking was impressed by the level of support provided by Yellowfin. "They came over and helped us to get it all set up. Certainly their level support is one of the best I have received from any organisation to date." It is not just the technology that has to be easy to use. One of the key success factors for Yellowfin has been the quality of its support. "We understand that when companies purchase software what they are really buying is a service, and this service is part of the total product which has to be easy," says Hewitt

Since 2003 Yellowfin's mission of designing simple but powerful BI for business people has been embraced. This has enabled Yellowfin's expansion into Asia, Europe and North America. Next year will be a pivotal period for Yellowfin's suite as companies depart from traditional breed tools in favour of options that provide lower cost of ownership, ease of use, SOA, and operational flexibility. Yellowfin is well positioned to take advantage of this developing trend.
(Yellowfin.com.au)
Received on Wed Nov 15 2006 - 13:29:24 CET