Extending BMC Smart Reporting to Yellowfin BI: Webinar Recap

Welcome to the BMC Smart Reporting to Yellowfin BI webinar recap!

Following our recent webinar for BMC customers held on January 18, 2023, this blog provides a helpful summary for those who could not attend or who would like a quick text recap on the most important points. 

Speakers at the event included:

• Atanas Popov, General Manager - Yellowfin
• Jean Lawson, EMEA Partner Manager - Yellowfin
• Uwe Reimers, Master Consultant – Responsible for BMC ARS Migration Projects at Materna
• Carl Edwards, CEO - Rhino Analytics | Data Solutions

Missed the event? You can watch the webinar on-demand for free at your convenience. If you prefer to read the highlights, we've got you covered in our handy recap - read on.

Why Yellowfin is Ideal for BMC Customers

As BMC has initialized its end-of-life plan for BMC Smart Reporting for Remedy, BMC customers now have an exciting opportunity to convert their reporting and analytics to Yellowfin BI, which is the foundation for Smart Reporting.

The largest organizations in the world choose BMC’s tools for their scalability, features, reliability, and security. What many of you may not know is when BMC was choosing the best platform for its Smart Reporting module, they selected Yellowfin for its perfect alignment of features, value, and security. BMC Smart Reporting is an implementation of Yellowfin versions 7 and 8.

Recently, BMC decided to re-platform Remedy into a new software as a service (SaaS) solution, named BMC Helix. As part of the platform, BMC is using lighter analytics tooling powered by Graphana and wants its customers to make their own choices for BI and analytics tools. 

Yellowfin continues to be a critical business intelligence (BI) partner for BMC and a logical option for BMC customers, especially since it is possible and relatively easy to convert all of your Smart Reporting functionality and reports to the latest version of Yellowfin BI.

Benefits for BMC Helix & Smart Reporting Customers using Yellowfin

Existing BMC customers (Helix and/or Smart Reporting) have an exciting opportunity to use Yellowfin and unlock the following business benefits:

• • Continue to use all your existing reports
  • Leverage existing Smart Reporting skills
  • Support tight integration between BMC Helix and Yellowfin
  • Integrate new data sources into your ITSM reporting and analytics
  • Get best-in-class enterprise BI functionality
  • Continue to work with BMC Partners

Below, we will go into more detail into why these advantages are hugely beneficial for BMC customers.

1. Existing Reports and Skills

While Smart Reporting is running an older version of Yellowfin, much of the core functionality is similar. Therefore, you can take your existing reports and convert them to Yellowfin with ease and efficiency.

Essentially, a copy of your reports is transferred into the new Yellowfin instance and we point it to your existing Remedy database. Many of the reports would run “out of the box.” Others may need some additional configuration; however, the process and required skills are already on hand within your team or your BMC Partners, making Yellowfin the ideal transition solution

2. Tight Integration Between Yellowfin and BMC Tools

Yellowfin uses the existing BMC drivers to connect to BMC data. It also supports single Sign-On (SSO) for authentication, so going between BMC and Yellowfin is relatively straightforward. There are several ways to sync user permissions and access, making it easy to transition and carry over your existing identity management practices into the new solution. 

One of the reasons that BMC selected Yellowfin originally was the robustness of its data governance and data security which are critical for large enterprises. We’ve ensured that all BMC customers can continue to leverage these features with ease using Yellowfin.

3. New Data Sources

BMC customers will get some important incremental benefits from using Yellowfin vs Smart Reporting. One of them is the ability to report from multiple data sources. ITSM reporting has evolved significantly and the demand from customers also. Overlaying customer data, project data, testing data, and countless other data sources can increase the value IT provides dramatically. 

With increased cost pressures, cost allocation decisions are top of mind for every IT management. Yellowfin will help you get there. Due to Yellowfin’s flexible architecture, you can also save on data warehousing costs, as in some cases you can point to direct data sources, vs the multi-layer data cubes required by other solutions.

4. Best-In-Class Enterprise BI Functionality

Yellowfin has evolved a lot in recent years to include many cool new features, such as much improved action-based Dashboards, Assisted Insights, Collaborative Data Storytelling, and Guided Natural Language Query (NLQ).  However, some of the core features around scalability, security, and data governance continue to be paramount differentiators, especially when it comes to BMC customer needs. 

Tableau and PowerBI are good tools, but when it comes to centralized reporting and analytics, they fall short and the governance “mess” they could create is a substantial risk. Just starting with new and improved multi-sourced dashboards for most BMC customers will be a game changer.

5. BMC Partners

BMC tooling is robust and the robust partner ecosystem is an important asset for BMC customers. That will continue to be the case in using Yellowfin. BMC Partners are already familiar with the tooling. The new capabilities create powerful options to create new value for customers. 

In our Webinar, BMC Partner, Materna, demonstrated a solution they built for a customer with Yellowfin including transferring reports, synchronizing users and security, and creating new dashboards. The latter was covered briefly and we will have more content on exciting new options with Yellowfin Dashboard for BMC coming soon - keep us bookmarked!