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April 28, 2010
Yellowfin 5.0 Webinar
There are only 6 business days left to secure you place for the webinar launch of Yellowfin 5.0.
Join Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin, as he presents this webinar and launches the milestone release, Yellowfin 5.0. on Tuesday, May 4th (Monday, May 3rd USA)
Yellowfin 5.0 incorporates features that enable fast deployment and fast analysis such as in-memory analysis and excel spreadsheets as a data source.
This webinar will cover:
• In-memory analytics;
• Excel spreadsheets as a data source;
• Filtering a critical part of your user experience;
• Integrated meta data management;
____________________________________________
Register Now!
Business Intelligence just got easier. Find out how the use of in-memory analysis delivers faster deployment and even faster analysis.
• Date: Tuesday, May 4th (Monday, May 3rd USA)
• Cost: Free
• Time: Choice of 3 - to suit your timezone. Space is limited, so reserve your Webinar seat now
9.00am – 10.30am AEST
1.00pm – 2.30pm AEST
5.00pm – 6.30pm AEST
Register via this link
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/200373113
Please note: after registering, you will receive an email confirmation containing information about joining the Webinar.
Cheers,
The Yellowfin team
www.yellowfin.bi
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 7:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2010
Kiwis Love Yellowfin
http://www.ncs.co.nz/newsletter_issues/ba/201004yellowfin.htm?xid=&xtrkm=0
Yellowfin Case Study - Taupo Drills Down Deep
Biggest advantages: it provides a stocktake of information, greater understanding of all the information that is being collected for decision making, eliminates duplication of data collection, it’s easy to find detail and data is stored centrally for all to use.
That’s a brief overview from Taupo District Council’s System Analyst David Fear on Taupo District Council’s experience of Yellowfin. Spinoffs include the improvement to corporate and organisational intelligence plus improved customer and staff satisfaction.
“I’m delighted with its functionality. It’s an awesome package, timesaving, easy to use and exciting,” says David.
He gives NCS credit for its input and partnership in achieving Taupo’s Yellowfin roll out, developing prebuilt views and smoothing the development.
Taupo wanted an integrated, effective reporting strategy to help the council meet statutory requirements and have robust, useful information that was consistent and timely for developing policies. The council also wanted to use data for benchmarking. The goal was to collect and manage information to provide better solutions, a day-to-day basis to help manage workloads and improved decision-making ability based on robust data.
“It also enables us to better manage progress and to improve the way we work,” says David.But he admits there’ve been a few lessons to learn along the way, since installation began in May 2008.
“One of the first is a clear need to improve the way information is stored and reported. Data was all over the place, it was very ad hoc and in some cases we weren’t even capturing the data we needed,” says David. Many reports seemed to be built up from data stored on different drives so it was hard to locate reports and some were never to be found again. Reporting was inconsistent, making it hard to glean an accurate picture.
Another lesson was to roll the system out to people who are keen to use it. Non users weren’t contributing to the collection of real intelligence so David’s team regrouped and changed the approach, focusing on the enthusiasts to help win support for Yellowfin by showing its advantages.
“Once that happened, there was a massive change in use,” he says. Yellowfin is now used in areas such as Health and Safety to provide easy audit, to manage infrastructure service delivery and to show staff turnover and other HR activity. Yellowfin is providing the ability to quickly audit and respond on time, and view quarterly activity at an operational level. Individuals, departments and divisions can monitor their own performance, as trends are highlighted over given intervals, such as monthly or year on year. Other reports show rates charged but unpaid, collection of rates, monthly breakdowns and rates rebate applications. All of these reports indicate where staff resources should be allocated if spikes in workloads begin to show. Trending information can also show the effects when staff are on annual leave. Regulatory systems are able to be drilled into to identify areas of concern.
Taupo now has about 100 Yellowfin users and holds regularly meetings to review use and provide training for report writers.
"Yellowfin is invaluable for keeping up-to-the-minute tabs on service requests. It produces easily read graphs and data and, being able to break down information into various formats (bar graphs, pie graphs, lists etc), makes the system highly useable. Being able to tailor the information it provides depending upon our department's needs is also excellent."
Kirsty Dutton, P.A. to Group Manager, Infrastructure and Parks Group
25 March 2010
“I have used Yellowfin regularly. Staff who believe that they are "doing all the work" and that workload is not evenly distributed can easily be shown from the facts and figures in Yellowfin that their complaint is generally unfounded. It is a great tool for this sort of activity. Also shows in simple format the amount of work being done across the board and is easily understood.”
Joe Mickelson, Team Leader - Compliance
25 March 2010
“All our stats painted in pictures, just the way I like it!”
Kylie Laurenson, Team Leader - Technical Support
25 March 2010
“Since using Yellowfin, I have lost 8 inches and 6 dress sizes.”
Norman Jones, Group Accountant
25 March 2010
“Yellowfin has given us instantaneous information at our fingertips in a format we want.”
Will Samuel, Project Manager - Organisational Intelligence
25 March 2010
“It is very easy to read and explain the data to others. Yellowfin displays the information in so many ways which is an added bonus seeing we get requests for information in all sorts of formats.”
Peter Shepherd, Team Leader Building Management
25 March 2010
“Yellowfin: It's so desirable, the Japanese want to harpoon it.”
Jared Johnson, IT Helpdesk
25 March 2010
“I refer to Yellowfin every day. I enter statistics into our KPI system, which is displayed in Yellowfin, and this is very useful for my staff to see how each month compares.”
Mary-ann Jamieson, Customer Services Supervisor
25 March 2010
“Yellowfin is an extremely powerful, yet easy to develop reporting analysis tool. I love the ability Yellowfin gives me of writing filterable analytical tabs and reports. This, in turn, empowers our dashboard users to easily seek and analyse the information they need in order to run their business units in our customer focused environment.”
David Fear, IT Systems Developer
25 March 2010
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 5:30 AM | Comments (3)
April 18, 2010
Whitepaper - In-Memory Analytics
Yellowfin has released its latest Business Intelligence Whitepaper, this time on "In-memory Analytics"
* No signup or email handover required
http://yellowfin.com.au/Document.i4?DocumentId=104879
Feel free to give us any feedback
Extract
As the name suggests, the key difference between conventional BI tools and in-memory products is that the former query data on disk while the latter query data in random access memory (RAM).
When a user runs a query against a typical data warehouse, for example, the query normally goes to a database that reads the information from multiple tables stored on a server’s hard disk.
With a server-based in-memory database, all information is initially loaded into memory. Users then query and interact with the data loaded into the machine’s memory. Accessing data in-memory means it is literally “turbo charged” as opposed to accessing that same data from disk.
This is the real advantage of in-memory analysis.
In-memory BI may sound like caching, a common approach to speeding query performance, but in-memory databases do not suffer from the same limitations. Caches are typically subsets of data, stored on and retrieved from disk (though some may load into RAM).
The key difference is that the cached data is usually predefined and very specific, often to an individual query; but with an in-memory database, the data available for analysis is potentially as large as an entire data mart.
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2010
Yellowfin turbo charges BI performance in milestone 5.0 release
Leading web-based BI provider, Yellowfin, will unveil their milestone 5.0 release in May 2010. This release includes significant enhancements; including an integrated in-memory database, that turbo charges analysis. Yellowfin 5.0 provides even greater insight, rapid deployment and requires minimal IT involvement.
Yellowfin, already makes Business Intelligence easy, but now much faster as well. With the inclusion of the new in-memory database technology, Yellowfin 5.0 can perform lightning fast queries that are faster to deploy, by following just three simple steps:
1. Connect to your data source
2. Map your data
3. Visualize
Glen Rabie, CEO at Yellowfin says, “This is a quantum leap in BI performance. With Yellowfin 5.0 there is no need for the complex and expensive processes of developing ETL scripts and data warehouses. It really is a simple process that our beta customers have already been delighted by.
Yellowfin enables users to see and know their business in new ways and interactively explore data without limits”. “Yellowfin 5.0 was the result of understanding how our customers wanted to work within the BI environment. The typical scenario was that deployment got bogged down due to query performance and the need to build data marts or data warehouses that would address these performance issues. As a result business users had to wait for this tedious non-value added step to be completed before they could even write a single report, leading to frustration. So Yellowfin developed an in-memory database to address this need” says Rabie.
Successful BI projects are measured by two core criteria: the speed of delivery and the speed of analysis. Traditionally there was a trade-off between the two. To achieve the analysis speeds required - complex project steps are required. However, Yellowfin 5.0 has two major features that deliver a significant speed enhancement over traditional BI tools.
These are:
1. An embedded in-memory database
2. A fully integrated user interface for all development steps
“What this means, is that with Yellowfin users can rapidly develop and publish reports and dashboards since the number and complexity of the steps required for delivering a reporting project is significantly reduced (minimizing project costs and risks) without the need to compromise on the speed and efficiency of the reporting and analysis. And that thrills the business user.” Says Rabie
With Yellowfin 5.0, In-memory analytics delivers decision insight with the agility that businesses demand. It’s a win for business users, who gain self-service analysis capabilities, and for IT departments, which can spend far less time on query analysis, cube building, aggregate table design, and other time- consuming performance-tuning tasks.
Yellowfin 5.0 is making Business Intelligence even easier. Rapid deployment through an in-memory database as a data source and improved filtering are just some of the new features that Yellowfin5.0 promises businesses, helping them make better, faster decisions to improve their business outcomes.
Ends
About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognized among 25 rising companies that CIO’s must know about, Yellowfin is a leading web-based BI solution that can be easily integrated into any third-party application or delivered as a stand-alone enterprise platform. Yellowfin is an innovative and flexible solution for reporting and analytics, providing a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities. www.yellowfin.bi
For further information or request for interviews please contact:
Catriona McGauchie
Marketing & Communications Manager, Yellowfin
Direct line: 61 3 9090 0454 Mobile: 61 (0)428 368 371 Email: catriona.mcgauchie@yellowfin.bi
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 6:30 AM | Comments (0)
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