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More than 70% of your organizational data has a location component - be it a customer address or a sales territory. This combined with the growing ability of businesses to quickly absorb large volumes of data, together with the increased availability of digital maps and spatially-enabled applications has created an unprecedented opportunity to incorporate geographic factors into decision making processes and analysis.

Location Intelligence is the capacity to organize and understand complex events through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information. This is achieved by combining location-related data with other business data, organizations can gain critical insights, make better decisions and optimize important processes and applications. Location Intelligence offers organizations opportunities to streamline their business processes and customer relationships to improve performance and results.

OR if you missed it ...

Read our Previous whitepaper on Mobility BI.

http://yellowfin.com.au/Document.i4?DocumentId=99556

Traditionally, customers conducting multi channel marketing campaigns were only able to analyze web data by using Google Analytics and there wasn’t a tool available to allow inbound call reporting.

Jet was already collecting valuable Call Data for their customers, so Justin set about finding a solution that would combine GIS and Business Intelligence and could be deployed as a SAAS platform to his customers.

He found exactly that with Yellowfin, an Australian, web-based business intelligence provider that offers native integrated Location Intelligence.

Since implementing Yellowfin into Call Tracker - Jet Interactive has revolutionized the Marketing Analytics industry by providing their customer’s the ability to query the “where” as well as the “what” and the “when” from the call data collected from every aspect of their marketing campaigns, providing an immediate competitive advantage. Cynthia Nilsen, Advertising Specialist, Australian Hearing, Customer of Jet Interactive said 'With 110 independent centres across Australia, the only way we could track the effectiveness of our marketing activities was via Jet Call Tracker.'

Jet customer’s now have access to the full suite of marketing reports that use Location Intelligence to visualize call analytics to optimize their advertising spend. Customers can log on securely to the hosted platform to access their data where and when they need it.

By combining Call Analytics with Location Intelligence, Jet’s customers can track the success of their traditional and online marketing campaigns as they happen, allowing them to make changes to ensure a successful return on investment and gain a significant competitive advantage realizing Justin’s vision.

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
Media Inquiries:

Catriona McGauchie
Marketing & Communications Manager, Yellowfin
Mobile: 61 (0)428 368 371 Email: catriona.mcgauchie@yellowfin.bi

Traditionally, customers conducting multi-channel marketing campaigns have been able to analyse web data spatially in a limited way by using tools such as Google Analytics but they didn’t have a similar tool that would allow inbound call reporting.

Justin Graham, Jet’s CEO, had a vision to reshape the inbound call provision market by allowing customer’s call data to be analyzed as easily as their web data and with a far greater emphasis on the spatial component. He sought a solution that would use GIS to allow customer’s to visualize their call data and regional statistical and demographic data in conjunction with standard tabular data.

The inability of marketing professionals to access timely and accurate data to track the effectiveness / ROI of their marketing campaigns had long been a major problem that required a GIS solution. The challenge was to find a solution that would be a combination of GIS and Business Intelligence and could be deployed as a SAAS platform and that offered the ease of use required by his target market.

Justin’s users are not GIS experts – they are business users typically from the marketing department that want to view their data spatially and have the ability to manipulate the spatial component of their reports via the web. Having a desktop application was not an option – delivery had to be via the web.

As part of what Jet does it collects tens of thousands of call data records (CDR) for their customers per day, and these provide a reference where the call came from – the originating exchange. Graham knew that by taking this exchange data and overlaying the Australian Bureau of Statistics data, his customers could also look into the demographic profile of callers. Jet used a mapping service to geocode all the 6000 exchanges across Australia to provide both centroid point data as well as polygons for each telephone exchange. This was stored as WKB geometry reference data in their call tracking data warehouse. The MySQL data warehouse contains call summary data for each telephone number used across all of the customers marketing campaigns.

Yellowfin’s approach to Location Intelligence is to tackle it from a Business Intelligence perspective rather than the more traditional GIS one. This means that the Yellowfin treats spatial data as another, albeit complex data type that needs to be available for both tablature as well as visualization based reporting. Yellowfin has developed optimization techniques such as intelligent caching and multi-layering to overcome the performance issues that non-GIS tools often have when rendering large multipolygons. This innovation means that not only are the queries not slowed down by grouping on geometry, but the geometry data need only ever be brought back from the database once. The result - reports that are incredibly fast to run – something, which web users simply expect.

By using Yellowfin the difficult issues with combining disparate datasets, spatial and non-spatial, into easy to use reports were solved. Yellowfin’s unique ability to not only query traditional BI data but also render spatial data such a point and polygons has enabled Jet to merge their call data seemlessly with census data and provide their customers with an unparalleled level of data visualisation and understanding of their callers demographic profile.

Graham says “Yellowfin’s integrated Location Intelligence allowed the call data to be analyzed as easily as web site traffic”, explaining that he sought a solution that would use maps to allow his customer’s to visualize their call data and regional demographic data in conjunction with standard tabular data. “Many providers offer their clients basic inbound statistics, but this misses the rich insight that can be gained when including spatial data into the analysis,” says Graham. “The benefit that we got with a product like Yellowfin was that it all came out of the box – fully integrated. This allowed us to rapidly develop a highly interactive portal for our customers who are not GIS experts but business people who simply need to visualize their data spatially”.

Integrated Location Intelligence has allowed Jet to create a more sophisticated call analytics tool than what Google Analytics offers because of the geographic and demographic data used. Customers can see a range of integrated data for very small geographic areas, increasing the level of complexity of analysis that can be conducted.

Life for marketing professionals has changed dramatically. They can now generate accurate and timely reports that calculate the customer conversion rate, where the call originated from, as well as showing the demographics of that location. From here they can ask how does this fit with our products positioning and branding? Will this call have a higher conversion rate than other locations? What’s the population density and does this impact the propensity to call? Without call tracker’s spatial analysis they could not answer these types of questions.

Since using Yellowfin for its Call Tracker solution, Jet’s customers have the ability to query the “where” as well as the “what” and the “when” from the call data collected, providing them with a distinct competitive advantage and a tangible way to track and measure the ROI of any marketing campaign and channel.

By combining Call Analytics with Location Intelligence, customers are able to track the success of their traditional and online advertising campaigns as they happen, allowing them to optimize their advertising spend by region and population segmentation.

www.yellowfinbi.com

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With the advent of the mobile phone a fundamental shift occurred in telecommunications. You no
longer called a place but you called a person. The internet provides an even greater degree of
interconnectivity, and it is these changes which are having a profound impact on businesses and the
way in which they manage their people mobile or otherwise and the access that they provide to their
data assets. This white paper addresses these changes and discusses the impact it is having on
business information delivery.
The convergence of Business Intelligence and mobility, resulting in the capability to deliver data
anytime anywhere, has been well underway for some time. Professionals are fast becoming
comfortable with the use of smart phones not only for communication purposes but also as a means
of keeping up to date on business information. The result of this is that your company’s work force
will soon see mobility as the norm rather than a specialised set of applications when they happen to
be on the road. The dispersed work force and the end of the commuting to a cubicle era will soon be
upon us, and you should build out the IT plan to accommodate mobility as the rule rather than the
exception.
This paper looks at who the audience for mobile BI applications is. Senior management and
executives, key sales people and field service personnel. What are the key influencers driving the
need for mobile BI, and the benefits that are in store for an organization that embraces mobile
analytics.
Beyond that, this paper analyses the requirements, both technical and organisational that are required
to ensure a successful rollout of a mobile BI platform. One that will have a direct impact on improving
an organisaton’s bottom line, by increasing its competitive advantage, its employee productivity and
the level of customer satisfaction.

Unlike the majority of BI applications for the iPhone, which simply use the browser as a delivery mechanism, Yellowfin for the iPhone is a native application, which makes full use of the iPhone’s functionality to deliver Yellowfin’s renowned industry leading, easy to use, analytic capabilities.

“What’s different about Yellowfin on the iPhone compared to other BI apps is that we understand the Business intelligence needs of a Mobile worker are different from that of an analyst sitting at their PC.” says Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie, “They are not using their phone with its tiny screen to do advanced analytics, rather they want instant access to data without the fuss. This is why we completely redesigned the user interface and navigation to meet the needs of the Mobile worker.”

The benefits of Mobile BI to an organisation with a large field team are enormous, the major benefits are:

* Improved Customer Service – Saving customer’s time, by enabling mobile workers to make decisions based on the right information, right now.

* Increased Productivity - Speed-up the decision making process, by extending critical information out to decision-makers in the field.

* Increased Competitive Advantage - Be a more responsive and flexible organization, by adapting having access to data that keeps the mobile worker ahead of the competition.

“As business people begin to use mobile phones and laptops almost interchangeably, and as those phones become capable of displaying rich Web content, mobile workers are seeking more extensive access to corporate data”, says Glen Rabie. “Yellowfin for iPhone connects you to the information you need - wherever you are, whenever you need it. You can view, analyse, interact with, and share information - then make important decisions on-the-go.”

The Yellowfin application for the iPhone addresses the concerns and requirements for a Mobile Business intelligence solution.

Fast – no rework. Users reuse existing report content, simply logging into their existing Yellowfin account. With Yellowfin you do not have to re-create content for the mobile platform or repackage it for mobile distribution. This allows customers to gain the benefits of Mobile BI immediately.

Secure – reuse of all of the Yellowfin security infrastructure means that security is assured. No data is stored on the phone so the loss of the phone does not enable unauthorized access to your data.

Easy to use – intuitive navigation and quick access to favourite’s means that users need no extra training to use the application.

Yellowfin has been offering integrated reporting and analysis software to organisations and its OEM software partners worldwide. "Many of our customers have thousands of people both inside and outside of their organisations that rely on Yellowfin reports and dashboards to provide timely business information," said Rabie. "We are delighted to offer interactive reporting and analytics on the iPhone to help enhance the productivity of our mobile BI users."

Yellowfin recently launched version 4.1 of its BI Suite and a generic mobile interface that provides full- featured delivery of both dashboards and reports to a mobile workforce. The iPhone module released today is available for free from iTunes.

About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognised 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.

http://yellowfin.bi/YFSite.i4?currentPage=24436

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSDvmD3xeUg

Yellowfin is a global business intelligence (BI) software development company that offers a flexible 100 per cent Web-based solution for reporting and analytics, providing a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities.

Yellowfin helps organisations to see and understand their data better than ever. CEO, Glen Rabie is currently in the Philippines to launch the partnership with Techwave at a special client event and said “we are very delighted to be announcing this partnership and look forward to working with Techwave to develop a successful business here in the Philippines.”

“Techwave, as our partner are a great fit in terms of both their technology skills and their complementary relationships such as with Redhat and Sybase that sit very well with the Yellowfin platform,.” said Rabie.

Techwave Managing Director, Michelle Hallare, said “the partnership with Yellowfin significantly makes it easier for enterprises, especially the SME market to implement a Business Intelligence solution that is less risky due to Yellowfin’s ease of use and low price points.”

About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognised among 25 rising companies that CIO’s must know about, Yellowfin is a leading web-based BI solution 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

About Techwave
Techwave was established in 2004 and has an outstanding team that specializes in networking, data communication and reporting. Since its inception, Techwave has established itself as a trusted provider and partner of numerous companies here and abroad. To date, it is the exclusive distributor of Yellowfin Technologies in the Philippines, one of Red Hat’s Advanced Business Partners, a reseller of Portwise and a successful distributor of the Secure Computing Line of McAfee. With Techwave’s expertise and Yellowfin, Red Hat, Portwise and McAfee’s line of products, we can provide businesses large and small with award winning products that will help secure, analyze and report their important information.
http://www.techwave.com.ph

For more information and interviews please contact:

Peter argues, "A lot of the tools are very sexy. You can do 3D pie charts and donut charts; in theoretical terms it is known as the data to ink ratio. If you have embellishments and 3D effects you are using a lot of ink for only a small amount of data". This he added makes it difficult for your average user to understand the reports generated out of the BI tool.

Some tools offer too many widgets and buttons, over complicating the user experience and therefore end up being hard to use; but in my view, sexy isn’t the problem, says Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin Business Intelligence. If a BI tool is sophisticated and provides the business user with an easy to use interface then what is going to stop high take up rates.

As a world trend, BI utilization rates are actually growing, you see analytics almost everywhere in many different forms; Workers at many levels of the modern organisation use and benefit from data analysis tools. So for those BI vendors that offer “easy to use” tools with some of that sexy functionality, you don't want to confuse implementation with what is often required in the sales process.

The idea that vendors are responsible for the poor implementations of BI projects is not correct. Any enterprise product can be implemented badly or well. Just because a product offers extravagant features does not immediately mean it will be a dead duck. However, vendors are driven to show-off their “bells and whistles” ("extra ink") during the sales cycle to differentiate their product from the competition. Implemented well, these “bells and whistles” can look awesome and really help to sell product.

O’Donnell refers to Edward Tuffe in terms of Ink and quite frankly his comments are not an accurate fit when discussing modern BI tools. Tuffe was talking about too much Ink back in 1975 when the main place people came across charts and data visualisation was in newspapers where artists emphasised the slant of the article through exaggerated graphics.

Having said that, we acknowledge, some of the modern vendor bells and whistles have crossed the line into bloat-ware. A classic example is the bouncing flash chart. It’s painful to wait for the bouncing to stop so you can focus on the value of the data.
It is clear that BI vendors are feeling the pressure to include these embellishments; but what is driving these developments? After all vendors don’t develop product for the fun of it – new releases and upgrades are based upon getting a positive return on investment; In short, increased sales.

If we could somehow stop the demand for things like the rotating 3D pie then all would be good. Unfortunately, I cannot see how that will change in the short term (not that I am a huge fan of even the basic 3D pie anyway!).

The landscape is changing, today’s analytics and the expectation of a clean ‘low ink’ delivery style is becoming more pervasive. A good example is Google Analytics.

At Yellowfin, we often have customers referring to Google Analytic dashboards when describing the type of BI deployment they want. That’s not to say that Google is perfect but some of the things they do is clever and great design. The interesting attitude is that people refer to it as a benchmark.

With the evolution of the web - customers and vendors alike are able to easily research all the BI tools available and are deciding what tools work for them. Like natural selection, the market driven by users and their business problems will over time select for features that work, ignoring features that offer little value.

What is interesting though is there is a growing debate about ‘what is good report design?’ in terms of delivery, I agree with the discussion and I am eager to watch the outcomes of it.

Traditionally BI tools were the domain of IT rather than business users. Very little focus is given to the design of content and the information it is intended to convey. Report and dashboard development is all too often a technical process not a design one.
Now with BI tools such as Yellowfin that have been designed specifically for the business professional; these subject matter experts now have the ability to deliver data and visualise business meaning in ways most effective in communicating to stakeholders.

At Yellowfin, we are going to do our bit, clearly there are some things we do to help sell our application but at the same time we make sure that it does not get in the way of ease of use. People can quickly and easily build reports and data visualisations that they need to help them in their knowledge work. Sometimes there is a place for the bell and whistle - often it’s about the right choice of bell and whistle to draw the user’s attention to what they should be looking for in the data.

www.yellowfinbi.com

http://blog.jetcallanalytics.com/

Jet Call Tracker™ is a comprehensive set of 50 online reports that display a wealth of information about call patterns and the people who call your 13, 1300 and 1800 phone numbers.

Jet Call Tracker is an analytics, or business intelligence (BI) tool that features numerous dashboards and reports that can be accessed online via any browser. The reports are interactive and can be used to dissect every aspect of caller’s behavior such as geographic regions and demographic profiles of the suburb, town or post code they are calling from.

Q. What is your attitude towards open source?

A. Yellowfin is philosophically very supportive of the open source movement and we have engineered our tools so they live inside an open source sandwich. They run on Linux and other open source systems. We have some significant components of our solution that are open source such as JFreeChart and Tomcat.

Q. Do you face much competition from open source?

A. I don’t think we do. It’s a political movement as well as a technical effort. People who buy our products don’t typically want to buy open source because they want to acquire a total solution – which includes a high level of technical support as well as an integrated end-to-end presentation layer. Do you want a mission critical customer facing reporting portal that’s not as well supported? Arguably a commercial product can bring about better support these days, maybe that won’t be the case in the future. But at this point our general philosophy is that we like the open source movement, we are not challenging it, or challenged by it, and we welcome it into the Business Intelligence community because it’s a hotbed of open research that we benefit from and like to contribute to.

Q. Where do you see most of the use of open source BI?

A. We generally see open source BI within other software applications, rather than within the enterprise. I think this is because the open source products and their high requirement for developer customisation are more suited to a development environment. Having said that though, we are also seeing a trend whereby Software vendors are looking to embed greater levels of BI functionality into their apps. They are looking for functionality such as self service reporting, which is not exactly the open source forte. If offered then the issue with open source BI tools is that they are a loosely coupled set of applications which have been developed and continue to be developed in isolation. Yellowfin is a single integrated solution which is making it easy for vendors to integrate and deploy analytical applications to their customers.

Q. What do you think of the open source trend in BI – where is it heading?

A. This is an interesting one. If I am going to be a bit controversial on this, I would have to say that there is actually no true ‘open source’ BI platform. The model in use by the likes of BIRT and Pentaho is a hybrid and more of a marketing position than a true commitment to open source.
To test this position I would say let’s take a step back and look at the goals of open source and then see if these principles are being applied to the Business intelligence open source vendors. Does the hybrid model of commercial open source actually deliver on the principles of transparency, openness and availability of source code. Taking a big deep breath one would have to say not.
I think that open source as far as it has been applied to the BI market is really about a small sub segment of product– Reporting not analytics. Any valued added component such as dashboards, scheduling and security are shipped under a commercial model. A Recent comment to me by a software vendor underpins this, “BIRT is what it is… but if you want end user ad hoc reporting you may as well evaluate all commercial options.” In my view the open source play is about baiting the customer and using core products as part of an up sell strategy. What we are seeing in the market is a continued march towards this paradigm – a greater focus on the commercial side of the business rather than the open source one.

Q. Is the recent purchase by Pentaho of Lucidera’s front end a case in point?

A. That is exactly what it is. Pentaho have more than bent the open source model with this purchase, and in all likelihood have lost their way. They have bought a great interface but you can just imagine the management team sitting around and saying – hey this is to good to be open source – lets keep it closed. Compare this behaviour with the likes of Redhat who have open sourced their recent acquisition of Metamatrix. The Lucidera acquisition is destined to remain closed source and a pure commercial play. Simply their actions indicate a very low level of commitment to the open source philosophy. So now as a customer of Pentaho you have this interesting scenario where you have to manage the different contractual obligations you have with them based on the product set you wish to use, this adds an enormous amount of complexity to the deal.

Q. How do you reconcile this view with Yellowfin’s use of open source?

A. As I mention earlier, there is a role for open source products and some components do make sense for us. However, what we do is manage the support and complexity for our end customer. We provide a wrapper for these products and deliver them as an integrated product. In some cases such as JFree Chart they are core to the product. In others, such as BIRT or Jasper renderers these are provided as a mechanism to provide the client with the choice of authoring tool that suits their particular needs. Again we recognise that customers who use these open source tools are not getting a ‘total solution’ and Yellowfin basically offers to fill the gaps. Not unlike the open source guys. We are just transparent about our business model.

Q. Well if that is the case how would you say that Yellowfin differs from open source providers?

A. On a business level, I would say that we have a lot in common with open source philosophy. We are incredibly focussed on developing a community around Yellowfin and increasing, the level of our community’s engagement with product development. Where we fundamentally differ though is on our approach to product development. Generally the rule of thumb of BI deployments is that about 80% of the cost is implementation related. Yellowfin has a huge focus on usability and we continue to develop and refine the interface accordingly. Our goal is to lower the level of implementation effort required and it is this philosophy that is at odds with the open source service revenue model. The major benefit of Yellowfin over Open Source is the cost of implementation and time to market. So whilst at a high level yes you can have the similar functionality with open source and their associated commercial products it is incumbent upon the consumers to build a BI development competency within their company to hook all the pieces together, and that is not the way we do business.

Extract from Print Media.
Open Distribution: Permission Given

References to other companies are for reference purposes only

Unlike the majority of BI applications which integrated 3rd party Geographic Information System applications to provide spatial analysis, Yellowfin 4.1 delivers a fully integrated GIS capability tightly meshed with Yellowfin’s renowned industry leading ease of use and analytic capabilities. More than just static maps Yellowfin 4.1 provides users with a high degree of GIS functionality all within a standard reporting and dashboard environment.

Yellowfin’s GIS Highlight in 4.1 includes:
* Web Map Servers (WMS) for rendering spatial data – access mapping data from any standard WMS service;
* Multiple Layers – allows users to dynamically add or remove layers from their maps; and
* Sophisticated Navigation

“As business people begin to use spatial data for Business intelligence in more sophisticated ways they are going to need their GIS capability tightly integrated with the rest of the Business Intelligence platform. For Yellowfin, rather than grappling with the complexity of integrating a 3rd party application – which only costs the customer more – we view location intelligence as simply another facet of our core application. Yellowfin can access spatial data from a variety databases and provides map reports either through its dashboard interface or as a web service. These maps services allow developers to embed maps into things like SharePoint or any other application. The Yellowfin approach is different from traditional GIS. It's really mapping for the whole enterprise”, says Yellowfin CEO Glen Rabie.

Yellowfin has been offering integrated location intelligence with its reporting and analysis software to organisations and its OEM software partners worldwide since version 4.0. "Many of our customers have come to rely on rendering their spatial data with Yellowfin and exposing it in conjunction with associated business metrics data to all their people via Yellowfin reports and dashboards," said Rabie. "We are delighted to offer this additional functionality which greatly enhances the interactivity and user experience and as a result helps them to understand the power of spatial analysis."
With 4.0

Yellowfin enabled querying and rendering of spatial data types for Oracle and MySQL in 4.1 they have extended this to SQL Server 2008 and other databases. However – the really big breakthrough in this release is the ability to leverage Web Map Servers (WMS) for rendering spatial data. This allows users to connect to any GIS application that uses the WMS open standard for map delivery. This combined with the ability for users to build map layers – which can be turned on or off at run time– means that users have a huge amount of flexibility to built and view spatial analysis with an incredibly easy to use interface.
Yellowfin recently launched version 4.1 of its BI Suite. The GIS module forms a valuable part of this application suite.

About Yellowfin

www.yellowfin.bi

Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognised among 25 rising companies that CIO’s must know about, Yellowfin is a leading web-based BI solution 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.

Q. How does GIS integrated with BI differ from the traditional GIS approach?
A. A typical spatial specialists approach to GIS data is that it is about land use – and the optimisation of that – where to put that next store. Well on the one hand that is true and there is a place for stand-alone GIS apps to do just that, but the power of GIS is far greater. Land use changes – where you put a store or a branch today may not be that ideal in 5 years time – however what action can you take based upon your now relatively fixed network. How do you market to the changing landscape of customers and attract them to your store, how do you optimise the distribution channel that you have, how do you accurately compare one stores performance with another based on customer catchment segment analysis not necessarily proximity (still a spatial question believe it or not). This is the greater reality of GIS data and the massive potential it has for improving business performance.

Q. What are some of the newer and more innovative ways in which businesses are using GIS data beyond traditional niches?
A. When you think of GIS traditionally you think of government and urban planning. The major application in the private sector to date has been logistics. However, this is changing. One of the key uses of GIS is store/branch/dealer location. A great partner of ours eSite does just that – but there is a whole lot more. The most compelling is the use of spatial data for optimising marketing campaigns. Understanding the demographics of your desired customer and where they are located is critical if you want to maximise the return on your marketing dollar. Its not just about being able to target them but also understanding what the likely-hood of them accessing your channel is – especially if it is a bricks and mortar channel. What’s the drive time? etc.
Jet Interactive a partner of ours has a fantastic use of Yellowfin spatial. They use the spatial analytic capability of Yellowfin to provide 0800, 1300 call information. By tracking incoming calls Jet Interactive can overlay not the location of the call but all the demographic breakdown of the locations population. This is a highly valuable service to their customers who can now accurately measure the effectiveness of response rates to phone campaigns from a spatial perspective.

Q. How is GIS being integrated with traditional business Intelligence?
It is already happening with Yellowfin Spatial. This is location intelligence as simply another facet of our core application and designed for an Enterprise platform independent stack. It can access spatial data from a variety databases and provides map reports either through its dashboard interface or as a web service. These maps services allow developers to embed these maps into things like SharePoint or any other application. This approach is different than traditional GIS. It's really mapping for the whole enterprise.

Q. You started out in as pure play BI presentation. Why did you get into GIS and when did you make the leap?
A. I did a little bit of urban planning whilst at University – dabbling really but I got a taste of how communities are formed and interact. Later I worked for a major bank in the BI space. We developed an impressive data warehouse but little focus was placed on the spatial side of BI. This was left to a separate department that concentrated on branch network optimisation –I did a little work with them and became fascinated by why some branches were more successful than others. Such a large part had to do with geography yet this information was never integrated into a manager’s view of branch performance. However, what really got to me was that organisations have whole departments that specialise in Geo Spatial business questions and yet these departments are rarely integrated into their general Business Intelligence and this I see as a major gap. I came to fundamentally believe that along with time – spatial data is a common and highly relevant dimension for any business.
So in the context of Yellowfin, I got really excited when in the last couple of years we had clients coming to us who really understood the interaction between BI and spatial data, and wanted to see their spatial data integrated into Yellowfin. It was with working with these customers that we really decided to take the plunge and develop our own native GIS functionality within Yellowfin to ensure its tight fit into BI. 4.0 was the first iteration of this – and not a bad start really. But with 4.1 it has really come into its own.

Q. So what are the main GIS enhancements in 4.1 and what does this mean for Yellowfin’s customers?
With 4.0 we enabled querying and rendering of spatial data types for Oracle and MySQL in 4.1 we have extended this to SQL Server 2008 and other databases. However – the really big breakthrough in this release was the ability to leverage Web Map Servers (WMS) for rendering spatial data. This allows us to connect to any GIS application that uses the WMS open standard for map delivery. This combined with the ability for users to build map layers – which can be turned on or off at run time– means that users have a huge amount of flexibility to built and view spatial analysis with an incredibly easy to use interface.

Q. You mentioned that there are big pay-offs for analysis with GIS. Does GIS belong integrated into core systems and applications such as CRM and ERP apps?
A. I think that just like BI and its GIS counterpart these are not core systems and are better integrated into application. Yellowfin specialises in providing an embeddable BI tool for software vendors. Our solution is easy to integrate and designed to support developers as well as end-users by allowing application vendors to rapidly bring spatial analysis to their customer base.

Q. The embedded mapping capabilities on websites often come from Google and Microsoft etc. What is Yellowfin’s niche?
A. Microsoft and Google are very much consumer-focused. They look at mapping as one more aspect of search. What they have done is pump prime the need for GIS applications. However, their technology is more geared towards fast visualisation access; it’s not a GIS system.
Yellowfin does not focus on the consumer – our target is the business user. Whilst we do use Google as a content provider for some of our maps we enable business users to actually build the content that can be visualised or analysed on the web. Analysis is where the big pay-offs on GIS arise, and this is where Yellowfin excels with its fully integrated Business and Spatial Intelligence solution.

Yellowfin Business Intelligence - www.yellowfinbi.com

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With more than 80 new features, Yellowfin helps organisations see and understand their data better than ever. New dashboard and visualization capabilities, along with federated queries and a host of improvements to spatial BI, make 4.1 ideal for rapid BI deployments. Yellowfin 4.1 is available for download at http://www.yellowfinbi.com

Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin says, “Yellowfin continues to strive to make business intelligence easy. 4.1 is another step in that journey. We have made a significant amount of usability and functional enhancements that make Yellowfin the leader in web based BI software.”

Yellowfin now offers unparalleled capabilities to create analytic dashboards and interactive visualizations that enable people anywhere in an organization to track and explore their most important metrics. Dashboards are now more intuitive, while at the same time providing a greater level of analytic capability.

“The recent changes to our dashboards are being driven by an increased demand for highly interactive dashboards that allow users to explore their data intuitively. The days of static dashboards are long gone, users expect to be able to slice and dice and drill into data effortlessly. 4.1 sets the benchmark in terms of flexibility and usability for creating different styles of tabs – but best of all they are fun to use and quickly deliver insight to the user,” says Glen Rabie.

The growing trend of Mobile BI is supported through the release of both a native iPhone application, and a generic mobile interface, that provide full featured delivery of both dashboards and reports to a mobile workforce.

Unlike most BI applications for the iPhone that just post static reports on a mobile screen, which may be marginally helpful but creates a tremendously frustrating user experience, Yellowfin for the iPhone provides the opportunity to interact with the data. This allows mobile users to access to the specific answers they need.

Federated Queries will enable users to query more than one data source at a time and combine the results in memory into a single report and /or table. This enhancement allows you to treat all your data sources as one virtual database and access them as a single query – enabling you to focus on building reports, not joining data sources.

The latest release delivers a wide range of improvements to Spatial BI including: GIS layering and enabling Web Map Service (WMS) layers on GIS reports. Multiple condition ranges enable users to divide a range of results into several smaller subsets and display them clearly on the one chart.

eSite is one of the first of Yellowfin’s partners to benefit from the enhanced GIS capabilities. “In my career I’ve used 12 or 13 different database/reporting systems…and I have to say that the elegance and practicality of the Yellowfin 4.1 design, and being totally web based, is just awesome compared to those systems.” Says Larry Manire, CTO of eSite.

More than 80 New Features

Yellowfin 4.1 has over 80 new features. Additional capabilities include:
• Additional charting and visualisations - Z charts, funnel charts and more.
• Improved Report List manager
• Filter Parameter caching for enhanced usability
• Additional administrative and configuration options
• Additional clustering support for improved scalability

About Yellowfin

www.yellowfin.bi

Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognised among 25 rising companies that CIO’s must know about, Yellowfin is a leading web-based BI solution 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.

Whilst Yellowfin, with it 100% browser based interface, has always been able to be deployed via the cloud, Yellowfin 4.1 offers enhanced scalability with improved clustering administration allowing for far larger and complex deployments. For example by using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud web service as the backbone.

Glen rabie, CEO of Yellowfin says “Popular applications for cloud deployment include software-as-a-service applications such as CRM, expense management, human resources, and Web analytics. But now we’re seeing a sudden burst of activity around business intelligence. This makes sense, since BI software shares characteristics with the aforementioned apps that make it right for cloud computing.”

"Cloud deployments address the problem of long and complex deployments. With Yellowfin’s browser based graphical configuration environment we are able to host the entire solution in the cloud. So other than making a connection to the company's business systems, there is very little burden on the IT staff or their budget," Rabie says.

The benefits of deploying Yellowfin in the cloud have been proven by Base2, who use Yellowfin to track real time performance metrics for field management services. "In the past you had to buy and manage physical servers to deploy Yellowfin, but now you can have Yellowfin running within 15 minutes," said Arthur Marinis of Base2 a Yellowfin partner.
Apart from faster time-to-value, Maris noted that the on-demand model allows Base2’s customers to scale capacity on the fly, and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Ron Dovich, a Yellowfin partner based in Austin Texas noted that “We choose to run Yellowfin inside of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud platform because our client does not own any hardware or have any in-house expertise for building out and managing the required infrastructure.”

Yellowfin has no plans to offer a SAAS BI application directly to end users. “What we offer is the capability for our partners and OEM partners to develop their own products and services in the cloud using Yellowfin,” says Rabie. The value in Yellowfin is that clients and partners have the flexibility to choose either cloud or traditional in house deployments. "While some BI vendors only work in the cloud, we believe it is important for our customers that we support the two," he said.

About Yellowfin

www.yellowfinbi.com

Yellowfin is passionate about making Business Intelligence easy. Recently recognised among 25 rising companies that CIO’s must know about, Yellowfin is a leading web-based BI solution 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.