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March 29, 2009

Yellowfin BI Evaluation Pack on The Server Side

Yellowfin a leading web-based BI solution that can be easily integrated into any third-party application or delivered as a stand-alone enterprise platform is now offering its full evaluation pack via "The Server Side" downloads.

With partners across Europe, America and Asia, Yellowfin prides itself as being best of breed in embeddable BI.

Yellowfin's products have been built using Java technologies like J2SE, Spring, and Ajax.

Yellowfin has been designed from the ground up to be embedded into third party applications and corporate intranets, delivering ease of use and real-time data analysis, through ad-hoc reporting and real-time dashboards.

Follow the following link

http://library.theserverside.com/itdownloads

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March 16, 2009

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March 10, 2009

Coffee chat with Yellowfin Business Intelligence, CEO Glen Rabie.

The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans wafts through a funky coffee shop, in Melbourne Australia. Glen Rabie settles in behind his Long Machiatto singing the praises of Michale, the barista, above the din of the coffee grinder. Melbourne is a town that takes its coffee seriously. “A large Italian migrant population defined the coffee experience here” says Rabie. And according to Rabie, just like its love of coffee, Melbourne is the centre of development for Business Intelligence applications.

Rabie a founder and CEO of Yellowfin, a Business Intelligence software vendor that was recently voted one of the 25 rising stars that CIOs must know about, senses my level of incredulity. Unperturbed he races on with passion educating me on the changes to BI and some of the applications that are helping to drive that change. Not only is Melbourne the home of Yellowfin but also companies such as Space Time Research and the world’s fastest ETL solution C-RX. The big change coming is the drive to rapid deployment and ease of use, he tells me.

The problem is that I have heard it all before. Major vendors have been talking about pervasive BI for years now and yet they have not delivered on this. “That’s the point! BI needs to be turned on its head” says Rabie. “None of the BI software architectures, or business models, support making BI easy. Think about, traditional vendors have partner eco-systems that are based on services, 30% of their own revenue is services income (more if you look at open source). Where is the financial incentive to develop BI solutions that are easy to use and implement? Imagine trying to sell cars the way BI solutions are sold. Sell the whole lot as parts with steering wheels and dashboards as optional, high-end extras. Only a tiny minority of people could buy this way, those with the time, resources and expertise to purchase all the required parts and then put it together. Yet, this is how the BI market is today. Vendors have convinced their customers that this is the way to purchase. So we have a multiplicity of products (at the presentation layer alone) such as dashboards builders, OLAP tools, Report Writers, Schedulers and on the list goes, and the poor customer has to put together. This is the trouble with the vast majority of the BI market right now!”

So why is Yellowfin different? “Fundamentally in two ways”, says Rabie. “Firstly we are passionate about developing software that is incredibly easy to use. Ultimately BI is complex stuff but how do you step back from that and ask yourself what parts of the interface get in the way of a business user trying to access and explore their data?” Yellowfin has truly dedicated itself to this task. Rabie is a great believer of the hands on experience and convinces me to trial the product. No demonstration, just a download link. My first impression was that I must have missed something, as the download was unconventionally small for an application that touts so much functionality. Once installed though, my doubts were quashed.

Here was a BI application that was fully integrated and so intuitive, that I finally got the point. The end user deals with a single interface, no file systems, no various applications for specific functions - everything in one application – and a user interface that would make any Italian Designer weep into their latte with joy. After just a few minutes I can see why a recent project at a Utility company took just 8 weeks to roll out 120 reports and related dashboards to 500 users. Yellowfin has been designed from the ground up for rapid deployment.

“The second point of differentiation is the Business model. Yellowfin partners predominately with either software vendors wanting to embed a BI application into their own application, or companies with domain expertise who develop specific analytic applications for rapid deployment. Forrester, recently noted that 60-80 of a BI project spend was implementation – “well sure with old school products this is the case but if you develop a partner base that pre-packages a solution you create scale and reduce the time to market.

Both the OEM and the value-added reseller deliver packaged solutions to their customers” says Rabie.
Yellowfin continues to make a splash in the BI market and rightly so. This is one of the best interfaces I have ever used for managing the data to dashboard life cycle. Not to rest on their laurels, Yellowfin have a clear and well articulated product road map which really does stretch the expectations of Business Intelligence capability via the browser. With this sort of product and a great business model Yellowfin has a great future and will really make an impact on its competition.

reproduced by permission.

Yellowfinbi.com

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March 5, 2009

Business Intelligence

As an economic downturn becomes a sobering reality, enterprises look for various ways to increase revenues and reduce costs. While overall IT budgets become targets for cost cutting, business intelligence (BI) applications and infrastructure need not fall into the same category. It's during times of economic downturn that business intelligence (BI) tools really come into their own; because if used strategically, leveraging BI as a corporate asset assists companies to continue to survive, compete, and thrive. That's according to Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin a leading BI solutions provider.

As Warren Buffet said “when the tide goes out it is easy to see who is swimming naked.” And right now the tide is going out. “Companies without BI capabilities need to act quickly, since without it they will be very exposed in the coming months and years” says Rabie. “For those companies without BI it is critical that they rapidly identify their key metrics and implement their BI solution rapidly, and it is highly unlikely that the mega-vendors are going to be enablers in this process”.
“BI provides companies with a central view of what's happening in the business. If a company's bottom line is not looking good, BI tools provide the ability to take a deep look at what's going on and get the nitty-gritty of why and where they are losing money. BI takes the guess work out of it and helps companies make better business decisions to improve the bottom line.”

“Right now companies which have invested in BI can really see a return on that investment. Now is the time to focus on better BI,” says Rabie. “In the face of the global economic crisis, rising costs and slow growth, tightly managing performance becomes even more critical. But without BI to show KPIs in a quick and highly visual manner, executives are left to ponder about who or what area of the business is not performing.

This is underpinned by recent Gartner research which stated that through 2012 more than 35 percent of the largest 5,000 companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. Not surprisingly the overarching theme of BI will be to combat such errors and to instead deliver greater business value, the research firm said.

An interesting shift by the Analysts recently has been in their view of standardizing BI vendors within organization. No longer is BI tool consolidation seen as a strategic goal for the CIO. Rather there is a realization that given current cost and speed to market considerations, and the segmentation of BI into solution sets there has been a failure by the mega vendors to deliver.

According to Gartner, while some companies have attempted to standardize on a single application or platform to address technology needs, BI cannot be effectively implemented using this type of approach.
There are often too many different types of vertical and functional requirements to be restricted to one standardized BI tool from a single vendor. A growing number of companies are recognizing that one size does not fit all, and are turning to a variety of distinctive BI tools. "Businesses should not trust their mega-vendor to solve all their integration problems. Vendors move slowly to integrate the disparate code bases they have acquired," Gartner explained in the report. "Reliance on one vendor also limits the ability to use best-of-breed capabilities."

Forrester, in a recent report, also recommends that companies use a more targeted approach of BI optimization, as well as an evaluation to see if lower-cost technology alternatives provide a strategic fit. This approach can enable organizations to do more with less, leading to a win-win scenario that can contribute to both top and bottom lines.

BI solutions in the coming year will be those that help organizations rapidly tackle specific, immediate business needs without taxing their valuable IT resources. These needs include reducing costs, increasing revenue, eliminating inventory and improving customer satisfaction. To do this, companies need to choose the tools or analytic applications that can be deployed in weeks not months. Forrester point out that the largest component of traditional BI projects has been the implementation not the software cost. However, that said Rabie points out that “the BI landscape is changing. The traditional BI project of months and years is no longer relevant. Solutions such as Yellowfin enable rapid deployment and as a consequence a higher return on investment. “

In the current recession, companies must choose IT initiatives that address specific business "hot spots" and offer a quick payback. Initiatives focusing on increasing revenue, reducing costs or improving customer satisfaction will reign. BI will provide organizations with visibility into opportunities to cross-sell into existing customers, ensure that at-risk revenue is secured, identify new opportunities, rationalize costs and inventory, and meet goals set out by leadership. As companies are targeting initiatives and solutions sets with a rapid ROI, the luxury of time is no longer a business option.

Reproduced By Permission (EBW)

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