What is location intelligence?
Traditionally, businesses can spend days, or even weeks physically compiling data from customer surveys and site visits. Location intelligence software can drastically reduce this process by mapping data electronically, thereby freeing up time for other activities.

How does it do this?

Basically, by using common data sources, such as GIS, aerial maps and even customer records, location intelligence technology can present data spatially – such as an interactive map format. This is much easier for our brains to process than traditional charts and tables. For example, by clicking on a map, managers can quickly gain an insight into any number of location-based business operations.
There are obvious benefits to this technology, such as tightening up business processes, improving customer relationships and even boosting performance and results.

Who uses it?
The applications are endless:
• telecommunications organisations use it for network planning and design and market analysis;
• Government uses it for many purposes, including census updates, urban planning, weather forecasting and emergency services;
• retailers use it for site selection, store performance analysis and demographic research; and
• media organisations use it for target market identification, media planning and demographic analysis.

But until recently, using this technology as part of a business reporting process has mostly been the preserve of experts. This is because it has operated on a stand-alone basis, rather as part of an organisation’s business intelligence platform. By converging the two technologies, a whole new level of data analysis can become available to the everyday user.
Yellowfin and location intelligence

The team at Yellowfin has acknowledged the popularity of location intelligence as a business reporting tool by incorporating the technology in its latest release, Yellowfin 4.0. This means organisations can now introduce location-based reporting into the business-decision making process without requiring GIS expertise.

Yellowfin 4.0 enables a variety of mapping visualisations to be used, including Google Maps, Heat Maps or fully-enabled GIS data-type rendering.

Of this latest trend in BI software, CEO Glen Rabie says: “With Yellowfin 4.0, we have taken two mature technologies (BI and GIS) and combined them. One of the most exciting aspects of our latest software is that even the casual business user can use this technology. This is one of the underlying principles of our Yellowfin products.”

www.yellowfinbi.com

Sybase Australia, a leading provider of enterprise infrastructure and mobile software, today announced details of its Australian and New Zealand technology partnership with Australian Business Intelligence software company, Yellowfin.

Sybase has entered into a sales alliance with Yellowfin to co-sell its market leading column-based database, Sybase® IQ, with Yellowfin providing the front-end BI presentation layer and easy-to-use interface.

Sybase IQ is a highly optimised analytics server designed specifically to deliver faster results for mission-critical business intelligence, data warehouse and reporting solutions on any standard hardware and operating systems. Its column-based architecture works with diverse data – including unstructured data – and diverse data sources to deliver unsurpassed query performance at the lowest price available.

Yellowfin is 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 enables any individual comfortable using a web browser to quickly visualise data through the use of charting, trending, dashboards and alerts.

“This alliance is highly strategic for both Sybase and Yellowfin,” said Steve Dolan, Director Channels & Alliances in A/NZ for Sybase. “Using Yellowfin’s presentation layer as the front end of Sybase IQ provides organisations with an all-encompassing business intelligence solution to very quickly find and analyse valuable corporate information. In today’s rapidly changing business environments, information and performance management is an important competitive differentiator.”

The partnership has already resulted in a successful outcome with Yellowfin and Sybase IQ jointly implemented at Paymark, New Zealand’s leading payment transaction company. Transactional data and reports are now loaded and produced in real-time for Paymark’s executive team.

For Yellowfin’s Chief Executive Officer, Glen Rabie, the partnership with Sybase is testimony to its technology capabilities and business development goals.

“We have specifically focused on tailoring the Yellowfin solution for Sybase IQ to link an extremely fast analytics server to a BI solution that makes mass data deployment easy and cost-effective. Sybase retains the relationship with its corporate client base who now benefit from a more user friendly front-end interface whilst Yellowfin gains a much larger potential revenue pipeline with such a significant partner. This deal also confirms our belief that Yellowfin is worldclass product with enormous global potential,” Rabie said.

About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is an Australian Business Intelligence company whose 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 100% Web-based solution for reporting and analytics, providing a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities. www.yellowfin.bi

About Sybase
Sybase is the largest global enterprise software company exclusively focused on managing and mobilising information from the data centre to the point of action. Sybase provides open, cross-platform solutions that securely deliver information anytime, anywhere, enabling customers and partners to create an information edge. The world's most critical data in commerce, communications, finance, government and healthcare runs on Sybase. Sybase ANZ is headquartered in Sydney, with offices in Melbourne and Wellington, New Zealand. For more information visit www.sybase.com.au or www.sybase.co.nz.

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For media enquiries contact: Lucy Tildesley, Marketing Manager Sybase ANZ, 612 9936 8827 lucy.tildesley@sybase.com, or Isabel Wagner, LEWIS PR for Sybase, 612 9409 3100, isabelw@lewispr.com or Shuna Boyd, BoydPR, for Yellowfin 612 9418 8100, shuna@boydpr.com.au.

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Sybase is a registered trademark of Sybase, Inc. or its subsidiaries. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Special Note: Statements concerning Sybase’s new business relationships and related products are by nature forward-looking statements that involve a number of uncertainties and risks and cannot be guaranteed. Factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially include shifts in customer demand, rapid technological changes, availability and quality of third party products, competitive factors and unanticipated delays in scheduled product availability. Some of the risks are detailed from time to time in Sybase’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, copies of which can be viewed on Sybase’s web site at www.sybase.com.

One of the key motivators for Yellowfin has been addressing the BI industry’s aura of complexity. Business Intelligence does not have to be complex, and Yellowfin is making it easy. In release 4.0 Yellowfin has turned its attention to Location Intelligence. Google has certainly made map-based querying a household concept, however, the application for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within Business Intelligence is still one that is viewed as overly complex and too specialised for the average business user. Well, according to Justin Hewitt, Yellowfin's COO, with Yellowfin 4.0 it isn’t!

With map visualisation organisations can free themselves of the usual constraints of traditional charts and table concepts and explore data based on spatial elements. Yellowfin enables a variety of mapping visualisations to be utilised, either Google Maps, Heat Maps or fully enabled GIS data type rendering.

“With Yellowfin 4.0,” explains Hewitt, “we are able to take two mature technologies and combine them, creating a unique symbiosis that generates new ways to visualise data. Most importantly though, we have opened this rich functionality up to the casual business user who can now discover what value location-based reporting can bring to business decision making. You no longer have to be a GIS expert to gain location based insights.”

Yellowfin Business Intelligence has been creating a quiet revolution with its easy to use, web dedicated, embeddable Business Intelligence software. “Release 4.0 is a major release for us and is one that we are thrilled about,” says Hewitt. “Although there are a host of new functional elements a huge emphasis is to continue to improve the existing application. Whilst there is a tendency in the industry to cram a new release with additional bloat-ware, a large part of 4.0 has been focussed on improving existing functionality by altering the user interface. To this end we have completely redesigned the view builder using the latest in AJAX techniques to provide a truly ‘wow’ factor to what is generally perceived as a mundane task.”

This continued investment in the user interface is indicative of Yellowfin’s development philosophy. “We don't believe in technology that you have to read the manual to use. Our goal has always been to refine the user interface with a highly intuitive workflow so as to guide the user through what is traditionally seen as complex processes,” explains Hewitt, “Yellowfin release 4.0 is another leap forward for us and we are excited about the benefits that it will deliver to our customers, providing them with additional capability to explore, mine and visualise their data.”

Reproduced by Permission

The ability to report on key business metrics via customer portals has become a deciding factor in today’s outsourcing contracts as businesses demand greater transparency and accountability from their suppliers. That’s according to leading business intelligence company, Yellowfin, which says it is increasingly providing solutions to outsourcing companies whose customers want them to underpin their offerings with advanced reporting tools and customer portals so they can monitor the outsourcer’s performance in real time.

Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie said momentum for outsourcing continues to grow as businesses seek to lower their costs by leveraging the capabilities of specialist providers. However, he said companies on their second or third round of outsourcing contracts have learned the hard lessons from past experience and now expect far more of their suppliers than simply reducing their expenses.

“In the early days of outsourcing, companies just looked at their transaction costs and didn’t think through all the implications for their business,” Mr Rabie said. “This meant that those who outsourced their HR function had less control over how they met their regulatory and insurance obligations, while companies outsourcing their marketing or product fulfillment lost access to key customer data.”

Mr Rabie said today’s outsourcing customers are driving a new level of service delivery by requiring their supply partners to provide extensive reporting of a wide range of business metrics to enable them to track their KPIs and ensure they meet their regulatory obligations.

“Regardless of whether they are a full service provider or deliver Software as a Service online, today’s outsourcers are expected to demonstrate a level of sophistication in their business intelligence that keeps the customer fully informed about the function being outsourced.”

Yellowfin Levels the Playing Field The business realities of outsourcing as a low margin, high volume approach means that small and mid-sized outsourcers can rarely afford expensive business intelligence tools, which is where Yellowfin’s affordable, web-based solutions come in.

“Yellowfin takes the hard work and expense out of business intelligence with intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that integrate seamlessly into clients’ existing systems and provide real-time access to a full array of reporting, analysis and collaboration tools via an online portal,” said Mr Rabie.

One of Yellowfin’s clients recently won a major outsourcing contract on the strength of its ability to provide the customer with online, searchable access to detailed business analytics about the outsourced function.

“Customers are no longer willing to simply give up control of any part of their organisation and nor should they. They want the reporting capabilities and transparency that will enable them to track their performance in all areas of the business, regardless of who actually delivers the service.”

Mr Rabie said advances in technology made it possible for outsourcing companies to provide secure access to customer and transactional records online.

“We’re increasingly seeing situations where contracts are being awarded on the strength of the outsourcer’s ability to support their service delivery with business metrics and analytics. Indeed, companies which fail to leverage these technological advances to enhance their offerings are destined to lose market share to their more proactive competitors,” he said.

ENDS

"Other technologies, such as personal productivity, collaboration and Internet search have been widely adopted by mainstream users in both their business and personal lives. BI has the same opportunity for massive adoption, but it must overcome its wellearned reputation of being difficult to use".

Much of the innovation in the BI space will come from emerging technologies that will make it easier for users to build and consume their own reports and analytical applications. In particular, five technologies — interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) — will help drive mainstream BI adoption.

"However, as a result of this innovation, individuals and workgroups will be less dependent on central IT departments to meet their BI requirements," McMurchy said. "BI teams need to understand how to use these emerging technologies to drive BI adoption, but do it in a way that doesn't undermine the organisation's existing BI architecture and standards". Interactive visualisation will be quickly accepted during the next two years as a common front-end to analytical applications, driven by the ubiquity of rich Internet applications. This technology trend will make reports and analytic applications easier and more fun to use. With its attractive display, it should be more widely adopted by users who aren't accustomed to the grid style of analysis and reporting offered by relational databases and spreadsheets. By definition, interactive visualisation enables users to perform typical BI tasks, such as data filters, drill down, and pivots, with little training by interacting with the visual, such as clicking on a pie wedge, or circling the dots on a scatter plot.

Smaller companies that lack a current base of investments in BI systems will increasingly turn to service companies to deliver services that integrate, analyse, and report on data from numerous systems. Wider adoption of SaaS business models will make analytical applications more widely used, particularly among midsize companies. However, even large companies with full BI and data warehouse teams will embrace the SaaS model for some aspects of BI. The best example today is in Web site analytics, where business users — typically in marketing — can access very sophisticated reports and analytic applications of Web site activity with virtually no need for IT by using a software-as-a-service provider.

SOA, coupled with a move toward a model-driven architecture, based on a visual drag-and-drop development style, will make it easier to build BI applications. A proliferation of this drag-and-drop style of development will drive resurgence in departmental analytical application development. This will, in turn, encourage adoption and usage, but also has the potential to result in more rogue deployments that buck standards set by a central BI team in IT.

About Yellowfin Business Intelligence
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At Yellowfin, we are making Busienss Intelligence easy.

Yellowfin is regarded the most easy to use and integrate, embeddable BI solution on the market. Yellowfin works closely with leading international Software Vendors and System Integrators throughout Asia, North America and Europe.

Yellowfin's Business Intelligence suite is an innovative and flexible 100% web-based solution for reporting and analytics. It provides a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities that can be easily integrated into any third party application or delivered as a stand alone enterprise platform.

Visit Yellowfin's home site to take an online tour or request a demo, you will see how Yellowfin will improve the efficiency and profitability of your organization.

www.yellowfin.com.au

The past year has seen a huge amount of activity in BI Tool consolidation. We have continued to comment on this activity but now at last we have the release of a Gartner Report that comments on these changes and spells out what this means for the industry and BI customers as a whole.

According to Gartner the business intelligence (BI) market is in a state of flux. Whilst they see this as a threat to the long-term existence of a separate set of vendors in the market, it’s also an opportunity for BI to deliver more value to users. As companies incorporate BI into their eco-systems by making BI more strategic and pervasive, and increasingly embed BI functionality into their workflow and business processes, the case for BI as a mission critical functionality increases.

Gartner’s Key Findings

The purchases by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have consolidated big portions of the stand-alone BI market. These purchases will accelerate both industry understanding of the value of BI and also the value derived from BI by end users.
Innovation will be driven by new vendors who will start by filling in the gaps in ‘mega-vendors’ product lines.
BI platform revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6% during the next five years.

Why the Consolidation?

According to Gartner the main reasons for the level of acquisition seen in 2007 included:

IBM, Oracle, Mircrosoft and SAP are increasingly looking to control access to organisational information by locking customers into their technology stacks.
Increased revenue, both by growing product license revenue, and also by reaping current maintenance revenue.
Embedding analytics directly into workflows and processes, both from an application and middleware perspective, is a capability that is gaining increasing significance.

What does this mean for the customer?

Interestingly not a lot of commentary by Gartner on what it means for existing customers but if we look at the recent announcements by SAP then we can get a sense of what is to come. SAP have announced:

A rationalisation of their Business Objects / SAP product set – by either wholesale removal of overlapping product sets or integration into a single product. Not great for those customers that have a significant enterprise investment in now redundant products.
Increased prices for Business Objects – in an attempt to recoup their $7 Billion investment. Consolidation (reduced competition) and “ownership” of data accesses is reducing price pressures on Vendors.

What does this mean for the independent Vendors?

With recent consolidation, remaining stand-alone BI players will have to accelerate innovation to maintain their leading edge. Some emerging areas in BI are predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive visualization techniques and in-memory analytics. Independent Vendors can also continue thriving by specializing horizontally, geographically or vertically. Embeddable BI tools will become more of an option for OEMs and custom business application developers as they seek alternatives to products that may be owned by their competitors.

About Yellowfin Business Intelligence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At Yellowfin, we are making Busienss Intelligence easy.

Yellowfin is regarded the most easy to use and integrate, embeddable BI solution on the market. Yellowfin works closely with leading international Software Vendors and System Integrators throughout Asia, North America and Europe.

Yellowfin's Business Intelligence suite is an innovative and flexible 100% web-based solution for reporting and analytics. It provides a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities that can be easily integrated into any third party application or delivered as a stand alone enterprise platform.

Visit Yellowfin's home site to take an online tour or request a demo, you will see how Yellowfin will improve the efficiency and profitability of your organization.

www.yellowfin.com.au

Rolling out a quality BI product through the enterprise is not a task that can be just assigned to a single silo group, it requires management and work groups to commit to a long term project, it requires cross group co-operation, data cleaning, data sharing and most importantly education. Resistance groups can appear during the project when people feel the challenges out way the benefits to them or that better reporting may threaten their own jobs; while others may believe that company data should not be openly available.

To address these blocks and help get BI implementations off the ground more quickly we have compiled a list of the top ten most common cultural issues with BI project rollouts. We then asked the CEO of “Yellowfin Business Intelligence”, Glen Rabie, to detail some of his own company’s frontline experiences with enterprise BI and provide some solutions to alleviate the anxiety.

1. Complexity

(ACW) BI projects bring with them a new set of problems, company data is generally is disparate systems that must now be linked, data is often duplicated, data archiving and cleaning become more important, there are political issues to solve, different hardware and opsys to consider, which appliance to use and then the massive problem of educating people. What is it about BI projects that make them so complex?

(Glen Rabie)
To be honest I do not actually think BI is that hard. The true complexity lies in a number of items – one, actually defining the reports and data that people want. Business analysis and really engaging the end users is critical. Two, data cleansing – many applications allow users to enter junk – and the BI tool by exposing data makes this data visible. Now you have to go back and clean all that up! Lastly, you have the big bang approach. To many companies feel they have only one shot at a BI project. In my view this is the wrong approach. Start small and develop an incremental framework for delivering BI over time. Let you users see what they are getting in stages and allow them to learn what they actually need. And yes – give people time to improve business processes to clean up that data.

2. Change

(ACW) This single issue can stall an IT project at any point, people fear change or perceiving a threat to themselves, whether it results in more work for them personally, greater scrutiny or worst case make their jobs irrelevant/obsolete. Business Intelligence tools can result in a great deal of change – what are the cultural impacts of this change?

(Glen Rabie)
Like any project there are always a bunch of people that just like doing it the old way. Their power is derived from being the gate keeper to data – take that away with a BI tool and you do change their working lives. The problem with the BI project is that the gate keepers are critical to success. If they block or attempt to de-rail the project then there is little chance of delivering a great outcome.
There has been a tonne of articles written on the blocker so I will not delve to deeply. However, another more subtle failure occurs when key users do not get involved in a project due to other higher priority tasks. For BI to be successful a series of sign-off steps need to occur to ensure data accuracy and that what will be delivered will be of business value. If the key internal users do not get involved and are just waiting for the delivery of the BI project – the project will fail. And as usual the project team is held accountable. Drive the change management and really make sure that all stakeholders are involved and sign-off on every step within the project.

3. Investment

(ACW) Like any IT project, BI projects require investment in time, money and human effort. The investment can seem too steep for the payoff for some.
Why do BI projects suffer from a perceived lack of ROI?

(Glen Rabie)
Well this is the recurring theme of BI. Business users want it, and yes it does cost money and yet putting your finger on the value of information and how that translates into accountable business benefits is incredibly difficult. The way we like to think about it is simple – imagine working without internet access – in the early days no conceivable benefit but now, who could imagine a knowledge workers life without it? Sure you can continue to use excel and cobbled together processes and save money by not going out and doing that BI project – but in the long term will your business grow and thrive using that strategy? Probably not!

4. Just another Buzz phase

(ACW) Like many of the must have technologies that have propagated through international corporations, from CASE tools in the 80's to WEB2.0 today. IT managers fear Business Intelligence for the masses will have limited usefulness and after the initial interest period will gather dust as people get on with their established ways of working. What is you view on this?

(Glen Rabie)
I think the opposite will occur. If we look at the history of business computing the persistent trend is to making users self sufficient. Lets take Excel as an example. In the early days there were a handful of excel super heroes in an organisation – now it is ubiquitous – everyone pretty much knows how to navigate a spreadsheet. What is lacking from the spreadsheet, however, is the centralised access to multiple data sources – and that is BI. People now are starting to want direct access to their data without IT’s intervention. And that is a trend that will not stop.

5. What’s wrong with Excel? attitude!

(ACW) Business and IT groups have become used to using the tools they have at hand. Traditionally Excel is the application that people are quite comfortable for most of their data manipulation and reporting. Do IT managers believe it is sufficient for most staff?

(Glen Rabie)
Look it depends – I do not want to speak for all IT managers but I suppose a large set would feel this way. There are a myriad of problems about using excel – most of them not visible to management – and so in that sense not a problem.
Some of my favourites - How did users get their data that they are manipulating in the first place? How much time do they spend putting it together and re-running each month? It’s a great way to blow away a few days every month. How accurate are their assumptions and calculations – and on it goes. Sure excel is a great tool but it does not deliver consistent, auditable and replicatible BI – end of story!

6. Measurement

(ACW) CIO's and business groups want to implement BI across the organization to drive new efficiencies, but once that decision is made. The next phase is to establish how to prove those efficiencies are occurring and that people are embracing the technologies benefits.

(Glen Rabie)
As I mentioned earlier – measuring BI is incredibly hard to do. How do you measure the value of email within a company? Why bother with PCs. Simply put - BI tools are enablers – they will become critical business infrastructure.

7. Executive expectations

(ACW) Often a key driver for a BI project is the executive team’s desire for a sexy (sic) business dashboard. Do many IT managers fear that the BI rollout will not meet the lofty goals executive have envisioned.

(Glen Rabie)
The needs of the executive team differ vastly from those of operational users. In my view it is best to deliver operational reporting first and then the executive dashboards – problem for the guy paying the bills I know! However, the reason for this is that if you deliver high level dashboards to the exec team if the data is trending the wrong way they will want to drill down for answers from their staff. If their staff do not have access to the same data at a lower level – how will they respond? Well basically they will query the data – the numbers can’t be right – that tool is wrong! So it is a fine line – our approach is to deliver less data initially but deliver to all segments of the business, so that the executives get sales data but so do the customer care people etc. That way everyone has access to the same data; all be it from different views.

8. Organisation Size

(ACW) Some organisations bypass Business Intelligence, in the belief that their smaller size or lower staff count will not benefit from business intelligence. They assume that BI is only relevant for government or fortune 500 companies. What is you take on this?

(Glen Rabie)
Well BI is for everyone. Running a large business or a small business is the same. If you do not have total visibility of all your key metrics then you may miss those critical opportunities or risks for your business. Sure you budgets to implementing BI are going to differ – but so then will the complexity of your business. For example a small business is not going to have 100 different data sources, which means getting something up and running will be a much lower cost – and the benefits to the business almost instantaneous.

9. Data security and management.

(ACW) Business groups may desire greater freedom of access to company data. However, IT just see's the problems. Suddenly with the data aggregation, comes the issues of data cleaning, data partitioning, extraction from disparate stores and keeping the sensitive data access controlled.

(Glen Rabie)
Any BI project will come across security issues. If you have a robust BI platform in place then security should not be a headache. My number one advice in this area is to make sure that whatever tool you use it must have row level security infrastructure. You have to be able to write a single report and share that with many users in the confidence that they will only see the data that is relevant to them.

10. Data Confidence

(ACW) IT having rolled out the enterprise wide BI project, now discovers that it must manage the ongoing problem of data trust, people are making decisions that affect the business daily and those decisions are being driven / supported by the business intelligence tools. How will IT guarantee that the reports and dashboard elements, can be trusted?

(Glen Rabie)
And now for the bombshell – data quality really gets to way much airplay. It’s good for buy-in but really you do not need 100% accurate data. That is not the role of BI. BI is about trends and overviews, not transactional accuracy. If your sales trends are heading south – but a couple of records are inaccurate by 5 or 10% - what should the exec worry about? Care about the trend of your business not the quality outliers! However, we all know it is an issue, and I did touch on this earlier – there are a multitude of applications out in the business world that allow users to enter junk data. The options are: one, to educate users on data entry. Make accurate data entry a KPI so that data is cleaned over time. Use your BI tool to highlight poor quality data and fix it at the source. Two, for those with a bigger budget – change your applications so that more data validation takes place at the front end. Again this is about fixing it at the source – do not try and clean data continually at the BI layer. There are better methods for that.

Permission for open release (ACW)

So now Big Blue steps up to the plate, and for $5 billion in cash, buys Cognos. This quite large acquisition for IBM quickly adds more BI-oomph to the IBM "Information" portfolio, but also importantly takes Cognos off the market from anyone else. Other suitors would probably have been Microsoft and perhaps HP. This BI value could have burnished HP’s total managment drive and complemented the Opsware purchase.

The only real surprise in IBM’s Cognos buy is the way it contradicts IBM software chief Steve Mills longtime stance that IBM isn’t in and doesn’t want to be in the applications business. IBM spent $3.5 billion in 1995 buying e-mail and collaboration applications maker Lotus, a deal the company has struggled with: IBM’s Lotus integration was rocky, and Lotus Notes continues to steadily lose ground to Microsoft’s rival Exchange.

Mills softened his "no applications" position in a conference call with press on Monday, following the Cognos announcement. "We haven’t changed our strategy in any fundamental way. We have applications technology in our portfolio today," Mills said, citing Notes and FileNet, the content management software maker IBM bought last year.

Pending shareholder and regulatory approvals, IBM expects the Cognos deal to close in the first quarter of 2008. Channel integration plans won’t be worked out in detail until further in the planning process.

It will be interesting to see how IBM will support all the Cognos partnership deals with many vendors, ISVs, channel players, SIs, and users. For example, Cognos just joined a partnership with Software AG, which competes with IBM on several levels.

So what are the highlights? These include:
• Advanced Querying with Sub Queries
• Enhanced KPI and Dashboard Reporting
• Improved Chart interactivity
• Additional Related Report options – tabbed and linked
• SQL Reports with user prompts and source filters
• More Flexible Data Format Options
And a whole lot more…..

Yellowfin 3.3 Making BI even easier
The biggest change in 3.3 is the inclusion of sub queries these will permit all users to write complex reports through our easy to use interface. Beyond this the majority of changes are focussed on better data visualisation and interaction with reports and data.
Changes to the KPI tab layout make metrics even easier to interpret. Interactive charting will let your users swap metric on their charts and enable them to better compare multiple series of data.
For those SQL report writers out there we have included scripting to enable user prompts and source filters to be defined bringing the functionality to be on par with drag and drop reports.

3.3 The good stuff

Sub Query
The biggest change in 3.3 is the inclusion of sub-queries. Sub queries permit as user to generate far more sophisticated reports. For example if you wanted to compare the sales results of this financial year with past years you may wish to use an append query or if you wanted to determine which customers were new in a particular year you would use a minus query. In both these examples Yellowfin is generating two distinct queries and then combining the result set to provide you with a single table of results. With Yellowfin you can create 4 types of sub query, these are:
1. Union – inserts new rows into a table
2. Append – inserts new columns into a table
3. Minus – removes data through advanced filter
4. Intersect – removes data through advanced filter

KPI and Standard Dashboard Tabs
* The KPI style tab has been updated with sparkline trend lines and bullet charts for even better utilisation. These two elements assist to visualise the trend (sparkline) and compare all metrics against expected performance (bullet chart).
* Another feature has been the inclusion of associated reports to dashboard tabs. This allows you to include reports that would otherwise not fit on a dashboard as supporting reports for hat tab.

Interactive Charts
* To improve the visualisation of your data we are constantly improving the interactivity of our charting objects. In this release we have enabled series selection for both pir and category charts. This allows the user to flip between metrics within the same chart.

Tabbed Reports
* 3.3 includes two new types of co-display reports for linking reports together. These are tabbed and linked styles. The tabbed style lets you create a ‘workbook’ of reports with tabs to navigate through them. The linked style is used for charts such as meter charts where no data is passed from one report to the other but you wish to see more detail.

Changes – the small stuff
* Below you will find a detailed account of the changes between Yellowfin 3.3 and the previous major release 3.2.

Charts
* Alerts Inclusion of bar and background alert formats.
* Chart Formatting Additional chart formatting options.
* Chart Interactivity The ability to swap metrics on charts such as pie and category charts. This allows better visualisation of data.

Reporting & Dashboard
* KPI Page Changes to the look and feel of the KPI tab.
* Associate Reports The ability to add links to non-dashboard reports to a selected dashboard tab.
* Data Formatters New data formatters including URL links to external sites or applications. For example Yellowfin can pass an invoice id from report into a * financial application.
* Total Labels Being able to include labels for column summaries.
* Tabbed Reports Create workbook style reports by creating multiple tabs
* Linked Reports Links charts to detailed reports using as link report option.
* Suppression of Duplicates Suppress duplicates in column based reports for clearer report output and design.
* Report Section Summary Create section summaries and include these at the top of your report with hyperlinks to the detail.
* SQL User Prompts and Source Filters Include user prompt filters and source filters into SQL reports via a simple script.

Admin & Integration
* Command Line Importer Replace Allows you to replace reports and dashboard tabs through the command line importer.
* Source Filter Wild Card Allows you to insert a wild card into the source filter via web services.
* Broadcast Reply to Email Broadcast email link - make it configurable so that it goes to an OEM organisation
* Log-off Link Location Determine the location of the logoff link
* Report URL Access Access reports via a URL or permalink
* More Localisation Set name, decimal and thousand separator formats.
* Popup Suppression Allow the dashboard drill through to suppress popups and always open reports in line.
* Report Category List Update to UI to make it easier to determine the secure and default draft folders.
* Schedule Management The ability to view all scheduled tasks and delete them if required.

Source & View
* Bulk View Field Edit Allows you to select and categorise multiple view fields simultaneously.
* Copy View The ability to copy a view and edit a new instance.

Database / Platform Support
* Sybase IQ Support for Sybase IQ
* Cache DB Support for Cache DB
* Pervasive SQL Support for Pervasive SQL

Release 4.0 - Its big
As part of the Beacon program all clients and partners will be given the opportunity to influence the next release cycle. Release 4.0 is scheduled for release in April 2008
Just because Yellowfin is easy to use does not mean you have to forego the functionality you require. So we say thankyou to all those people that provided us with valuable feedback, suggestions and support for this release and look forward to more innovative suggestions for 4.0.
For information on how to participate please see the Beacon program for more details.

For any queries regarding functionality or if would like to include functionality on the wish list please visit: http://forum.yellowfin.com.au

For the software vendor Business intelligence as a business function continues to evolve from being primarily a downstream, after the fact application silo, into a value-added, integrated component of packaged and custom applications. This in conjunction with greater awareness of BI is driving software vendors to deliver a comprehensive BI solution as a module of their solutions. For the vendor this means that they can either develop a solution from scratch in-house or integrate a 3rd party BI package into their product suite.

In the past application developers have traditionally gone the in-house development route to meet their BI needs. The benefits of In-house BI development is a reporting solution 100% integrated into the core product, hence the usability, look/feel and navigation will be consistent with the core application.

The in-house option is fraught with difficulty however. For the vendor, with a speciality in a functional space, they do not have the time, expertise, resources, budget to build an enterprise quality reporting solution, In house design/builds also risk lengthy delays, design and construction complications and final product results that miss the expectation of the design phase – not to mention the sales / marketing teams. The engineering time associated with these delays and cancellations are very expensive and lead to opportunity costs of missed sales and revenue potential of a rapid go to market model. The trend for developers is now to reduce coding time and where code effort is needed to dedicate that time/effort to the core functionality. To do this developers must fill the gaps in function with other vendors products, be that commercial or open source options.

Speed to market and leading BI capability are the prime drivers for the selection of an embeddable BI solution. With embeddable being the key point here. In delivering a BI module to their clients the software vendors needs to search out a solution that can be highly integrated into their existing solution and sold as a seamlessly integrated module. After-all in the customers eyes they are purchasing an additional module from their vendor and do not want to deal with the complexity of a 3rd party.

The 3rd party integration option faces the difficulty of searching out other vendors products that achieve the required functionality, yet also integrate into the core products. Developers can try to pursue a tight integration or failing that they must bridge the two applications suites in a manner that does not confuse the end user. Bridged software can work well, but the end user will need to deal with two sets of navigation and differences in look/feel. For Business intelligence, most solutions are designed for stand alone usage, such that any attempts to embed them can be uneven. For example BI products such as Crystal and Microsoft Reporting services which are easier to embed, still suffer the legacy of the GUI world – they require client side software to be distributed to enable access.

Time and budget are always the constraining factors in the development and go to market cycle, so the business and architectural decisions in choosing any 3rd party business intelligence tool must include:
1. Its ability to be integrated quickly to save develop time,
2. Its high level of stability and functionality to minimize on going product support ; and
3. a cost sensible solution to allow customers to make easy buy decisions. If your core solution is currently selling for $100.00 per seat, it will not make sense to choose a BI add on that will drive that cost to $500.00 per seat. The BI module has to be inline with your pricing model..

In choosing a solution based on commercial aspects a "total cost of development" evaluation framework is required by which a vendor can anticipate their design results and minimize financial risk. This framework embodies a cost-based analysis of factors that include:
• The total time to market,
• the cost of development,
• development tool cost,
• maintenance and support costs; and
• The cost of runtime licenses.
This is essential in making any solution choice be it opens source or commercial.

One of the main choices in choosing a 3rd party BI solution is whether to go open source or a commercially supported solution. The commercial solution (or paid for open source) has dedicated professional development/releases and a commercially focussed company backing it or alternately one could look to an open source product, that is free to use, with a potentially inconsistent code base, uncertain development timelines, limited documentation, possible integration issues, but again at the end of the day is free. In Business Intelligence, open source projects like BIRT, Jasper or Pentaho offer developers products developed and maintained by strong communities. However, if integration and ongoing support costs are too great or not definable, then the developer may well be better off going with a commercial option.

Commercial options for software vendors include Crystal Reports, Pentaho (Enterprise), Jasper (Enterprise), Microsoft Reporting Services, and Yellowfin. Tier 1 products such as Cognos and Business Objects have been excluded since their highly priced commercial models and minimal integration options exclude them for the majority of software vendors as viable options.

Most software developers want to develop applications that are:
1. Platform independent to enhance their market potential. This means they are transportable across database technologies and OPSYS platforms. If this is the goal then BI platforms that lock a vendor into a platform must be excluded – for example Microsoft Reporting services which is to restrictive with DB options.
2. Browser based – so their BI solution must deploy with zero client footprint.
3. Integrated Security – so a highly flexible security framework is required. Many solutions only provide role based security and not data level security – which tends to be the core of most transactional application.

Crystal Reports was once the embedded reporting solution of choice. However, changes in ownership, and licensing, and the lack of reasonably priced ad hoc have had a huge impact on the embedded Crystal Market with Vendors looking elsewhere.

In terms of a product with a unique licensing model and functionality that is suited to the software vendor on solution stands out - Yellowfin. Yellowfin offers a pure browser based solution built on Java for n’platform support. Not only does it include its own drag and drop report writer but also supports BIRT and Jasper for added flexibility. The most interesting aspect though is the pricing model. Unlike traditional licensing schemes Yellowfin works with each of its partners to set and share the revenue generated by the end customer. This approach is different and its main benefit appears to be simplicity and profitability for both Yellowfin and the software developer. Yellowfin also has arguably the best dashboard concept and usability for business end users.
As a browser based solution designed from the ground up to be integrated into 3rd party applications it is unique. It offers dashboards, ad hoc ROLAP and MOLAP reporting, analytical functionality and a comprehensive meta-data layer.

JasperSoft and Pentaho both claim to be the most downloaded open source business intelligence software, and have very similar BI stacks. Their Suites are comprised of an interactive reporting server, graphical and ad hoc report design interfaces, OLAP, analysis, an ETL tool for data integration. Both offers an Enterprise version, which we assume is commercially packaged, installable, supported and documented. However, the licensing cost for the enterprise variant brings the cost of either option on par with tier 1 competitors such as Business Objects leaving little in terms of value added differentiation.

The choice for software vendors in embedded BI solutions is not an easy one. There are a multitude of options available to them. However, the main considerations need to be one that has the right level of functionality, is affordable; is easy to embed and most of all easy to use by their end users. The BI component of any application needs to be considered a core marketing tool – after all the sizzle created by a dashboard can be the difference between a sale or not.

Although we wish we could say these changes were solely our idea – we can’t! A lot of this release is a result of the fantastic advice we have received from partners and clients. If you wish to influence the next release then the taking part in the Beacon survey is your chance to shape what actually gets done! So if you were one of the many that completed the latest survey – then thanks (if not then there is always next time). Some of the improvements scheduled are listed below. This is not an exhaustive list but will provide you with a taste of what is to come.

A range of formatting improvements that will assist you to better visualise your data. This will include changes such as report summaries with hyperlinks to sections, additional format options for tables and columns. There will also be additional functionality for charting with extended interaction capability – stretching your expectations of what can be achieved via pure HTML delivery.
Additional integration options will provide you with even more flexibility for the deployment of Yellowfin into 3rd party applications or intranet environments. It may seem like boring old infrastructure but these changes will further speed up your deployment or time to market activities.
Users do not just read reports in isolation – they tend to browse a range of subject specific reports within the context of the work they are doing at the time. As such Yellowfin will be adding greater flexibility to its dashboards – providing you the capacity for linking reports together associated reports to provider deeper insight – that lets users link a series of reports together into a tabbed format.
Improved Freehand SQL – 3.2 already provided a full range of formatting options but 3.3 extends this with Source Filter Security, User Prompting and Advanced Functions providing the flexibility to author highly interactive reports quickly via your own SQL statements.
Enhancements to the Yellowfin View Builder which will greatly improve the usability and functionality of this process. No one loves Meta-data that much we understand – and we will keep trying to make this as easy as possible.
Introducing Broadcast and Schedule Administration – providing Yellowfin Administrators with total visibility of all scheduled jobs which they can manage to minimise redundant jobs being run.
This release builds on the fantastic achievements of 3.2. Our focus continues to be on improving data visualisation (without sacrificing ease of use) and assisting our OEM partners to deliver excellence in embedded BI solutions. We are very excited about the functionality that is to be delivered in this release.

We do not want to stop at 3.3 and we value your feedback; so don’t just wait for the next Beacon survey to have your say. Log into the Yellowfin forum at http://forum.yellowfin.com.au and you can contribute to the Beacon Wish list at any time. All good ideas will find their way into the next survey, and future releases.

The move wasn’t entirely a surprise; ever since the purchase of Hyperion by Oracle rumours have been circulating that Business Objects was next to be aquired. Industry watchers floated several likely candidates—including IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., and SAP—but few expected a deal to conclude so swiftly.

What do we make of SAP’s deal? Clearly the party with the most to gain are the SAP shareholders. There is, however, no advantage in this move for the Business Objects customer who are not SAP customers. In fact, it’s likely that SAP’s sales force will pressure such customers to buy SAP applications. After all, up-sell and cross-sell are prominent reasons for vendors merging.

One of the major impacts that few analysts have discussed is the impact on the embedded market. SAP’s acquisition highlights the journey some of the original Crystal Decisions customers have faced. Crystal was the recognised leader in embedded BI when acquired by BO in 2003. Since then, licensing and maintenance costs have spiralled, and now this is its fourth transition in that software in six years That’s a fairly significant impact to companies if they’re depending on the Crystal as their reporting engine either in their application or organisation.

ERP vendors who compete with SAP and currently bundle BO products as part of their reporting offering are now in a bit of a conundrum. Do they open up their customer base to SAP or look for alternative, independent and more flexible offerings such as Yellowfin. “All of this acquisition activity presents a great opportunity for Yellowfin” says Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie. “Most software vendors are uncomfortable tying their offerings to SAP, they want to deal with a Partner, such as Yellowfin, that works with them and not one that wishes to aggressively acquire their customer base. In the embedded space we expect to see a big shift away from Business Objects over the next 12 months”.

Product rationalisation will also have a profound impact on the existing customer base. There is a huge overlap in product functionality (for example between SAP NetWeaver and Enterprise XI) especially since Business Objects has boosted its product base with nearly a dozen acquisitions of which many have not been fully integrated and could easily be dropped. SAP isn’t known for supporting earlier versions of software or for being a quick, nimble company that offers reasonably priced products - so how the rationalisation and integration is to proceed is any ones guess.

In the final analysis, it comes down to customers, of course. The acquisition doesn’t appear to have much to do with adding value for customers. It’s more about maximising shareholder returns. The only question now is when will the next major acquisition take place?

With these changes in mind BI consultants needs to re-think the way that they do business. To adapt and survive consultants need change their current mode of operation where:

1. Each new client is a unique consulting opportunity, little to no
value-add is transferred from one project to the next.
2. Big is still beautiful - driving the client towards long term highly
complex projects.

Instead, to compete, BI consultancies need to develop and package up their own Intellectual Property which they can sell their clients in conjunction with the value added services that they offer.

The BI software market is undergoing a major shift. For all the talk and hype BI for the masses is starting to happen. BI solutions such as Yellowfin which deliver user friendly web based reporting are making BI easy, and analytical skill sets are increasing in organisations. Yellowfin's collaborative technology encourages report writing by the staff that own and know their data sets. Reports are easily shared with the non-expert user base. The days of consultants earning revenue by writing reports are coming to a swift end. Consultancies need to move up the food chain and add value through true business analysis, and longer term reusable BI elements such as data marts and data warehouses. This is where the IP crunch starts. By changing the focus from report building to back end development the risk is that if the entire business is built on a services model the consultancy may erode long term revenue. How this addressed will be covered later.

If easier to use tools were not enough, then the growth of traditional vendors clawing at the BI consultancies client and revenue base surely does not help either. One of the trends lately for the big boys has been to tackle their flattening software revenue is to take greater ownership of the entire customer BI project - from software to implementation. If all the consultant sells is their time then the value proposition for the client and their point of differentiation is low. However, if consultancies develop their own IP in their specialist markets they can offer their client lower cost solutions (through a reduction of deployment time and re-usable BI
components) at higher margins and thus retain their profitability.

And now the crunch - ERP Vendors and consultancies are rapidly seeing their revenue streams drying up as the ERP market matures. They are using their understanding of the ERP application and their client relationships to extend their offering to BI in an effort to boost their revenue streams.
SAP's purchase of Business Objects leaves no doubt. The mature ERP market has to extend its reach if it is to maintain revenue growth. It is here that we have competing skills - ERP consultants with an understanding of the source data versus those with an understanding of how to package and deliver it for BI. To compete with the ERP consultant the BI consultant needs to pre-package solutions for ERP applications that leverages their BI expertise and can be quickly customised for their clients.

To prosper as a BI consultancy the business model has to change. Focus less on the services revenue, instead consider margins and profitability. BI consultancies must invest in developing their own IP - such as pre-canned report product sets that are generic to industries and technology platforms.
These must enable cookie cutting and be sold as a tangible product. IP development creates tangible business differentiation that creates barriers against competitors who have not invested in product development. In addition to IP revenue clients will also procure services for customisation and so provide two streams of revenue. Now is the time for consultancies to decide whether to go the way of the dinosaurs or evolve and thrive with a hybrid services/IP business offering.

Organizations are now realising the need to manage effectively across tribal silos far more aggressively than in the past.

Silo groups are both the building blocks and bugbears of organizations; The old skill-group model has reached its use by date, modern organizations now require a more holistic approach (witness ITIL) to the delivery of services. While the individual skill sets must remain, reinforcing them with rigid organizational boundaries and siloed processes must change.

As Money is the primary reason for business, successful organisations look for ways to maximize revenue by increasing sales of products and services to new and existing customers. To stand out in a commoditized market place, organisations must understand what customers truly value and to do that they must unite internal resources to improve delivery to customers.

Management cannot just demand internal groups co-operate as modest initial changes will quickly evapourate. Management must foster change and support those changes through active management, new applications, shared data flows, centralized data storage, shared processes, culture shifts and education. The people who make up the organisation must adopt the mission that the changes they participate in will benefit the organisation through better service delivery and that will drive flow on revenues.

(Supporting Change)

Supporting these new service oriented missions are process architectures like ITIL and data awareness appliances like Yellowfin (Business Intelligence).

ITIL, which is being widely adopted today, specifies more effective cross-silo collaboration to improve processes across IT systems within the organisation. Originating in the late 1980's in the UK, ITIL® (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL® provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools. ITIL principles are not just limited to the IT department, the core principles extent to all organisation units as information flow and technology have successfully infiltrated all corners of the organisation.

Yellowfin is the industry BI appliance that organisations can roll out quickly to enable wide data knowledge improvements. Yellowfin has taken a fresh approach to information delivery by focusing on how people interact. The great failing of traditional reporting products is that they have delivered technology rather than business oriented solutions. The tools available have created barriers between those people with business expertise and the data they need to make decisions.

Yellowfin realised early that collaborative technologies are core to how people will interact within organisations in the future. The key elements of successful collaborative solutions will have both presence; (to allow communities of people to interact), and persistence; (which will enable a memory or continuity of that interaction).

Collaborative architectures like ITIL can deliver productivity improvements, but the true transformational changes can only occur when stakeholders have access to critical information as they need it. Yellowfin enables fast adoption in organisations by integrating tightly with existing data stores and applications. People don't just want another application they have to login to, they want tools that make sense, make their job easier/smarter and support their current practical day to day decisions.

Data and Knowledge awareness does not need to be complicated. Simple to use tools, providing access to relevant data is what business users want.

The principles of information collaboration also support cross-silo collaboration

* Easy access to data
* Tools that are easy to use
* Wider adoption of tools across all stakeholder groups
* Expert user identification
* Work flow
* Corporate publishing
* Work groups
* Dashboards

An enterprise reporting solution like Yellowfin is ideal in situations where questions are predefined and the structure of each answer is fairly well known in advance. In this case, the majority of users are information consumers who get snapshots of business activity. Business experts create reports that answer the most regularly-asked questions and distribute them to hundreds or potentially thousands of users.

While ACCESS and EXCEL allow silo groups to analyse small data sets on their desktops, these applications are not designed to manage larger data problems or wide scale data sharing. The introduction of dashboards and expert reports enhances visibility of organisational strategy, align actions with that strategy, and allows your users to track KPIs, assign goals, and collaborate/share knowledge. Dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate corporate data into a rich, graphical presentation using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphics to show multiple results together. Dynamic dashboards also let you drill-through to other data sources and reports for more detail about what the dashboard shows you.

Dashboards and enterprise report support cross silo processes via:

* Employee accountability - as they take ownership of their performance through improved visibility.

* Deliver at-a-glance information - Dashboards let people see immediately how the company, business unit or individual is performing in its critical areas.

* Communicate strategy effectively - Supporting business processes by expressing important information, key drivers, performance expectations, and the results - to make strategy relevant to everyone.

* Monitor performance against targets: Track critical performance measures in real time.

* Support Collaboration - Corporate performance metrics makes visible the impact one department has on another leading to proactive cooperation among different areas.

Under the tie up, Yellowfin will make the new engine called "Artificial Neural Networks" (ANN) available with its business intelligence solution for local and international markets. Users will have a highly insightful predictive solution to access optimized results from their business processes, according to EXTOLS MSC's chief executive officer Justin Tan

Tan said, with the ANN technology, users are able to have a computing system that resembles the human brain in acquiring knowledge through self-learning. Currently, humans are assisted to perform various complex tasks. ANN has the capability to address problems that are difficult or impossible to resolve by traditional computational and statistics methods. This technology can be deployed for face recognition, IP clustering, geo-location analysis, credit card processing, fraud detection, human resource application, vehicle traffic management, postal industry, market research data mining or any data sample in a complex environment that needs behavior analysis.

According to Tan, Extol is looking for more partners from various industries to bundle the ANN technology into their products.

We are already advanced in talking to two new potential partners and we expect the mature markets that are already utilizing ANN to be interested in incorporating this solution into their application," he said.

A similar concept to optimization, Tan said the ANN plus Yellowfin solution will benefit most industries to optimize the use of their resources to achieve desirable results.

Additionally the response time in producing the desired output is faster. In the financial sector, by incorporating the ANN engine with an active rules based system, we are able to increase the detection of legitimate fraud transactions in a shorter time period”.

Extol has been aggressively involved in artificial intelligence research and is currently working on a new ANN generation that operates on pattern recognition rather than rules. This will play an important role in providing intelligence to computer systems.

Yellowfin's CEO, Glen Rabie said the company has an established presence in the local financial, insurance and telecommunications industries. "We believe the collaboration with Extol will allow us to better serve clients in these industries. With ANN predictive analysis, customers will be attracted to this new technology as it gives the potential to save time, reduce costs and substantially drive business revenue"