-By Yellowfin CEO and Co-Founder, Glen Rabie
Things move really quickly around here, and it can be easy to forget to stop and reflect, to celebrate our wins and to solidify where we’re going. So welcome to my first Monthly Update for 2017.
I’m Glen Rabie, CEO and Co-Founder of Yellowfin, and I’m looking forward to taking you on our journey through this blog.
Plans for the business in 2017
This one’s easy. Grow. Grow really fast.
This is a bit Groundhog Day, because it’s the same plan we have every year. But it’s worked for us so far, so I’m putting it on the table – In 2017 we’re aiming for 50 percent revenue growth.
We’ve got a huge development pipeline of great features and functions coming out for our product. We’ve got significant new customer deals dropping over the next few months, and we’re in an ideal position to continue to grow the company in a measured way – despite the rapid pace of that growth.
Celebrating success
We’ve won significant business from some major new clients over the past quarter. Most notably, we’ve worked with a couple of clients in advertising and classifieds, which has seen our application roll-out to 10,000 and 12,000 customers respectively.
It’s enormously satisfying to see Yellowfin being used in this way, and to see these global deployments taking place. Best of all, our customers are happy and seeing great adoption rates for their applications.
People news: We’ve just appointed a new CMO
We grew significantly over last year, increasing our employee numbers by around 30 percent. We’ve put on more developers and support staff, as well as a team of consultants. Our services capacity is expanding, and spreading globally, as we grow our international teams.
We hired another eight people this month and we’re still recruiting for several positions.
Our most significant recent appointment was incoming CMO [Chief Marketing Officer], Chris Benham. You can read more about his appointment HERE >
Chris has a background in the security industry, having worked with both Symantec and Avast. He has a deep understanding of the software industry and global markets.
Chris is US-based, and has worked in Europe and Africa, so he has a strong sense of cultural disparities that crop-up in different markets. Now that we have direct offices in the UK, USA, Japan and Australia, an understanding of the dynamics of each of those markets is critical. That’s what we were looking for: Someone who fundamentally understands the software industry, understands the interaction with the analyst community, and understands our partner community.
It took a good 12-14 month search to find the right person for this role, and we’ve spent the last four months working with Chris on discrete projects to get a sense of who he is, and whether he is right for us.
I am confident Chris is going to hit the ground running and be a big addition to our team at Yellowfin.
Product news: Two big releases on the way
We’ve got two big releases planned for this year.
The first, due for release in April, is particularly exciting. As part of the release, we’re providing organizations with better control over data governance. It gives data stewards direct responsibility over the metadata created within Yellowfin. If that dataset changes, or definitions of that data need to be modified, it will go through Yellowfin’s approval cycle, which helps organizations to deliver broad, scalable analytics into their business.
At the same time, we’re also focused on enabling organizations to build truly stunning applications. We’ve put in a lot of work on the major charts to make them visually impressive. We’ve put in a lot of work on conditional formats – not just on the data itself, but on widgets within the canvas. For developers out there, a really exciting addition is the ability to use JavaScript charting engines, like D3, and plug those into Yellowfin as an alternative method of data visualization. You can read more about that HERE>.
So that’s this month – quite a bit packed in there! It’s going to keep me accountable – I’ll be back next month with more updates on what’s happening at Yellowfin.
Glen Rabie is a data geek and CEO/co-founder of Yellowfin. You can subscribe to Glen’s weekly blog by emailing pr@yellowfin.bi, or follow Glen on Twitter or LinkedIn.