All the feedback on Yellowfin 8

As we've taken Yellowfin 8 to market, we've been overwhelmed by the response we've had from media and analysts across the industry. We actually shocked the industry a bit because people didn’t expect an established dashboard vendor to be willing to disrupt themselves with two radical new products.

Something genuinely new

Overall, the feedback we received from the media was that we were doing something radically different and refreshing. Ted Cuzzillo, who's been a journalist in the BI space for a long time, told me that this was the first time in a long time that he's seen anything genuinely new from an analytics vendor. While John Santaferraro of EMA said, “EMA considers Yellowfin to be a leader in the use of AI, machine learning, contextual storytelling, and social communication for business intelligence.”

Stories or Signals?

One of the interesting things about the feedback we’ve received about Stories and Signals is that people tend to fall into one camp or the other. Generally, industry analysts, who are far more technical, have been more excited by Signals. They are thrilled about the use of AI and machine learning. While journalists, on the other hand, love Stories. They write narratives for a living so it makes sense that they’d be excited by a tool that helps users to do exactly this.

I think Frank Ohlhorst summarised the two use cases well when he said “Simply put, Signals brings forth the context needed to make analytics relevant. It's only one part of an actionable BI equation; visualizing the data brings forth additional challenges. Yellowfin uses Signals to drive Yellowfin Stories, a concept meant to bring data to life. Yellowfin Stories brings a data-centric narrative to the visualization process.”

What users really want

Generally the feedback we have received from analysts and journalists is really positive, but the feedback that matters the most to me is what our customers say. They’ve also been overwhelmingly positive about what Signals and Stories will do for their organizations. People who are very data centric tend to want Signals deployed today. That contrasts to business users who tend to be more interested in Stories. They can’t wait to get their hands on it and start using it to shape the narrative in their organization.

Allan Brown, Vice President and General Manager of Unified Workflow Solutions for Kodak, said, “Yellowfin is a core component of the Kodak Prinergy Cloud platform, which provides ground-breaking Analytics Enabled pre-press workflow to the Commercial Print Industry. We are extremely excited about the new features and functionality available in the v8 release and look forward to turning these new capabilities into profitable workflow solutions for our customers.”

While USGC said, “Yellowfin Signals’ automated analysis helps us cut through the noise and focus on the signal. Yellowfin Stories gives us the ability to create a narrative about the signal’s importance to the mission our organization.”

The future of BI

Almost everyone we’re speaking to saw Yellowfin 8 as a meaningful step change for the BI industry rather than an incremental improvement. This is best summarized by my favourite quote which was from Wayne Eckerson of Eckerson Group who said “Yellowfin Signals represents the future of BI.”