August 2022 Yellowfin User Group Event Recap

Welcome to our Yellowfin Customer User Group Event event recap for August 2022! Following our latest quarterly webinar, held August 9 -11, the Yellowfin team aims to provide a quick and handy summary blog for our customers that could not attend.

Here, you can find a general update on the future product roadmap of the Yellowfin embedded analytics product suite, including Version 9.8, coming this September. 

Speakers at the August 2022 event included:

• Atanas Popov, General Manager, Yellowfin
• Sherry Silhavy, Head of Sales, Yellowfin
• David Sanchez, CX Director, Yellowfin
• Leah Winterton, Head of UX and Product Design, Hub24
• Brad Scarff, CTO, Yellowfin

We believe it’s important to share what’s happening at Yellowfin, but it’s even more important to hear from you! We’ve prepared a short Customer Satisfaction Survey where you can give us feedback on key features and your overall satisfaction with Yellowfin. In appreciation, for each survey completed, we will make a donation to She Loves Data.

You can also watch the entire event on-demand, at your convenience, if you missed it! 

Yellowfin Company Overview, August 2022

The Yellowfin and Idera integration, which started in January, is largely complete. We have moved Yellowfin HQ to Austin TX, and new resources and training ensure that Yellowfin is well positioned for growth.

Yellowfin continues to be a strong stand-alone brand focused on contextual analytics. This market positioning, and our expanding commitment from embedded BI to BI applications, provide market differentiation and set a clear direction for our product evolution. Our Product Roadmap delivers several releases in 2022 aligned with this focus.

1. One of our primary objectives is to increase Yellowfin adoption. A community of experienced Yellowfin resources will accelerate growth and benefit all our customers. We are launching several initiatives to support this goal, including Yellowfin University, which is increasing in popularity, and have removed unnecessary gates to increase accessibility. We will republish training content on more content and education platforms, and you will see more free licensing options for non-commercial use, free tools, and templates.

2. New Summer Special offerings launching exclusively for existing customers. We realize that many customers have Yellowfin for limited use cases. We want to make it easy for you to use it more, whether it is an additional product or internal enterprise analytics reporting. Contact Yellowfin Sales for more information.

3. Yellowfin Free Salesforce Application is now available to customers. The Yellowfin CRM Module is an important IP that solves several management reporting challenges when using Salesforce. If your organization already uses Salesforce and you have Yellowfin licenses, this is a great way to increase Yellowfin adoption. Discover more by speaking with your Customer Success managers.

Yellowfin Customer Experience Overview

The Yellowfin Customer Experience (CX) team has a number of upcoming initiatives to further empower our enterprise and ISV customers to get the most out of Yellowfin.

Better customer request system: We’re constantly reviewing and updating CX processes, in particular, to improve the Yellowfin license request process, and are in the process of implementing a form on the website  you can use at your convenience to enter requests that will be tracked in a ticketing system. Our goal is to be faster and more accurate, in part through automation. 

New educational video series: Coming to the Yellowfin YouTube Channel, our new video series will include 2-3 minute “how to” video guides, commonly requested support items, new user support topics, underutilized resources, and handy tips and tricks. We will also be updating previous video topics where they lack details about new features or are based on old versions.

More training: Yellowfin University provides training for any role on your team, self-paced learning plus training through our partner Minerra. Going forward, you will no longer need a Yellowfin account to do one of the self-paced learning options. 

More Yellowfin Resources: Whether it’s the Yellowfin Community or Yellowfin Wiki, whatever you’re trying to do, someone has likely done it before. If not, you can create a public post and get members of the community to collaborate with you more easily. A public post can easily be modified into a private ticket for the support team to help you with. We also have continuously updated and expanded the wiki with more helpful guides and walkthroughs, from advanced configuration information to sample code. 

Design and User Experience Overview

Leah Winterton, Head of UX and Design at Hub24, leads an organization focused on helping make financial advice more accessible to Australians, and looking for ways to reduce the cost of that advice using data and technology to find innovative solutions. 

A persistent challenge Hub24 faced was the lack of a platform for valuable business context and data combined. Leah conducted user research and discovered that Hub24’s reports were just a small step in the process of preparing for a client meeting - what their advisors needed was a presentation tool to help them tell their investment story in a highly personalized format for each client, with data tightly intertwined. The previous process of producing this was multi-step, highly manual, and time-consuming, taking from one to 12 hours, and they required a better solution.

With the data storytelling capabilities of Yellowfin, they can now help end-users understand their data better, and answer questions on-the-fly with data that is up-to-date. Advisors can create highly engaging presentations without any manual work – and this proved to be a game-changing solution for Hub24. 

Watch Leah’s full story in the on-demand webinar here.

Product Roadmap Overview

Yellowfin has always been built for business users and developers alike. Our platform continues to provide enterprise-grade flexibility and capabilities, such as extending applications when they don’t go far enough in low-code/no-code, integration through REST APIs, and a commitment to fully open architecture and an open platform. 

Yellowfin has evolved and expanded greatly in the past year, with several major release highlights throughout 2021, including:

• Data storytelling improvements 
• The world’s most flexible dashboards
• Total fidelity with enhanced PDF reports
• New mobile app and APIs
• Guided Natural Language Query (NLQ)

Yellowfin’s strategic roadmap will continue our laser focus as the best analytics consumption experience available, backed by simple, yet exceptional capabilities for developers and IT operations.  Modernization and simplification of key workflows, and connector partnership is on our roadmap to enable greater choice and flexibility.

For the developer: We are introducing simpler ways to build a chart API to make the integration of JavaScript charts easier, especially for integration with FusionCharts, a sister Idera company. We’re also  extending our code generator with integrated API references, and an intuitive developer console one-stop shop for developer tasks.

For DevOps teams: A focus on scalable source management, with new REST endpoints for exporting and importing content and settings is on the cards, among other initiatives. 

Yellowfin Version 9.8 is planned for September 2022, with an NLQ bundle including cross-tab report generation, long-running query cancellation, and synonyms/Kanji support for our Japanese-speaking customers, plus many other customer ideas and bug fixes.

So, what’s next?

Stay tuned for the date of our next User Group event - we have a lot more in store for our customers and the Yellowfin suite! We also want to again express our thanks to our Yellowfin customers for your continued support, and we hope you find our latest resources beneficial to improving your embedded analytics deployment.