Introducing Yellowfin’s GM: Chance Coble

Yellowfin’s goal is to be the best choice for building business intelligence (BI) and embedded analytics modules for custom applications. In this blog, newly appointed General Manager (GM for Yellowfin, Chance Coble, shares the company's ambitious vision for 2025 and beyond.

Data-driven decisions for all

Today, I’d like to share updates on the strategic direction of Yellowfin and highlight how our investment aligns with our commitment to embedded analytics and enterprise BI.

If you already know me, it is likely from my time as an early adopter, advocate and consultant on Yellowfin implementations.  Over the past 15 years, I have watched Yellowfin grow in location intelligence, mobile delivery, collaboration, data storytelling and many other benefits.

The key reason I bought into Yellowfin years ago was the simplicity it brings to sharing information securely in and across organizations.  Yellowfin was not designed to enhance the work of a few analysts to develop more report content for the whole organization.  In fact, one of the frustrations the founders of Yellowfin felt is that such a model bottlenecks organizational intelligence. 

Yellowfin was designed to enable a wider audience to generate insights rather than depending on a few technical analysts or developers - a growing concept referred to as data democratization.  This design  drives the continuous commitment to expanding Yellowfin to find better ways to enable data storytelling, collaboration and insight development for more people.  Users of a wide variety of backgrounds and responsibilities need access to a business intelligence (BI) solution, and that is why Yellowfin approaches insight discovery for as broad of an audience as possible. 

Yellowfin’s customer-centric commitment to enabling all of the appropriate people at an organization to participate in discovering insights and increasing organizational intelligence is a key differentiator from our competitors.  This trait is reinforced by Idera’s commitment to creating a simplified experience in its products. 

Many organizational workers today are knowledge workers, that is their job is based primarily around the management of information and their decision making around that information. I believe organizations experience waste when those knowledge workers miss information that could have been unlocked to help them maintain directional correctness. Enabling them, not just a few analysts, to understand and collaborate on information that is properly organized and governed is how you improve organizational intelligence and thereby decisions.   

Most platforms today are geared towards a few analysts creating content, and Yellowfin’s strengths are in broadening this capability across a wide variety of individuals.  While many organizations democratize their information in the form of data lakes, they implement a presentation layer that bottlenecks the development of insights to a limited and oversubscribed few. Yellowfin is different because it is able to securely grant these stakeholders an interface that enables them to culminate their insights.

Our Yellowfin vision finishing 2024, and 2025

Moving forward, Yellowfin will continue to lead with our ability to make insight development simple.  Continued features enhancing simplicity including collaboration, the development of data stories and narratives and the democratization of insights across stakeholders in the organization will be our priority.  We want any authorized individuals to be able to generate their own insights and share them with the right people.  We have seen time and again that improving organizational direction is often about getting accurate numbers in front of the right people.  

We are going to make it simpler for everyone to securely find the numbers they need and to collaborate on them with the right stakeholders.   This involves details like report sharing and exporting (with the Yellowfin Export feature) all the way up to more intuitive user interface designs to navigate the rich platform features that are coming very soon. 

The longer-term future will involve making Yellowfin’s ability to seamlessly assist users in insight discovery and collaborate on those findings with their audiences, through continued refinement of our automated and AI-powered features, such as Guided NLQ and Signals.  Our commitment will continue to be spreading the benefits of business intelligence to as broad of an audience as possible, and inviting all users to participate in insight discovery.

Enabling analytics for product owners with embedded analytics 

For product builders, the appetite for insights is greater than ever, but the implementation needs are more complex than creating BI for internal audiences. Maintaining brand alignment, integration with the product ecosystem and technology and curating a seamless and context enhanced experience are high priorities.  Leaning on over-subscribed engineers to develop analytics by hand will leave customers feeling analytics were not a priority for the experience. New features are slow to come and maintaining a modernized experience will be out of reach. We live in a time in which everything I use from my cars to cooking devices provides me with insights. Customers have come to expect and demand transparency in all of their products and services, whether consumers or business users.

The feedback I see from Yellowfin customers is that our simplicity of integration and deployment streamlines embedding analytics enhancements and modernization. By using an existing set of analytics features designed to be integrated into your product, you will substantially reduce your go-to-market efforts. With Yellowfin, I have often seen analytics modules deployed in a product in less than 90 days from the initiative start.     

Brand alignment and styling in Yellowfin are unmatched, with a market-leading data visualization and content design interface and a fully featured SDK to make your user experiences seamless. Our goal is for your users to feel like they are only in one product and that their analytics are delivered within the context of their experience and authority, using our white-label analytics tools. We do not turn your product into an advertisement like some other solutions, with logo requirements and “powered by” language. 

Our investments in streamlined integration, prepackaged solutions and extending our SDK will make enhancing products an even faster and easier experience.   We want you to be able to step over the complexity and prohibitive investment many firms still endure by building their analytics from the ground up.  Our vision is to enable your product to deliver exciting, modernized experiences of insight discovery for your customers and to make that deployment straightforward for your team. 

So, what's next?

Following the recent release of Yellowfin 9.12, we will be focusing on several upcoming product features that leverage AI and deliver the modern, streamlined embedded analytics experience that our customers desire, including:

Ask Yellowfin: An AI-powered chatbot assistant that is set to provide real-time support and guidance as your users navigate the Yellowfin platform. Ask Yellowfin anything, from basic navigation to complex analysis tasks, and receive immediate assistance, making your Yellowfin experience even more seamless.

AI-powered Natural Language Query (NLQ): - Yellowfin first introduced Guided NLQ in 2021 to help users analyze data in a more human-like manner (without needing to use code). This has been a popular feature among business users and customers looking to do ad-hoc analysis on the fly without building full-fledged reports. Taking our popular Guided NLQ to the next level, we'll be infusing it with the power of Large Language Models (LLMs). This evolution will enable even more intuitive data analysis through natural language, allowing you to ask questions and receive insights without writing a single line of code. Learn what Guided NLQ is here.

Developer Assistant: As our product mission is to continue supporting developers, we will be leveraging AI to enable developers to generate code fragments for common tasks within Yellowfin. This will drastically reduce the development time as starting code fragments can be requested from the developer assistant in real-time.

These features are a continuation along our theme of empowering all users of Yellowfin to participate in insight development and collaboration.  We intend to thoughtfully include AI features into Yellowfin as they show a clear benefit to businesses and never buy into a frenzy of hype.  We will not prioritize technical novelty over beneficial business innovation, which we believe will provide more value in the next release of Yellowfin and into 2025.

I encourage any customer to contact me directly at chance.coble@yellowfinbi.com, or drop our team a line to give us feedback or learn how you can do more with Yellowfin.   If you are at Big Data London on September 18th, I’ll be there with our sister brand Wherescape so feel free to stop by and introduce yourself.

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global BI and analytics software vendor with a suite of world-class products powered by automation. Yellowfin is recognized as an innovator by the world’s leading analyst firms. More than 29,000 organizations and over 3 million end-users across 75 countries use Yellowfin every day.