Is your BI software visionary?

Making it on the Magic Quadrant

It’s recently been announced that we've made the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the seventh time. What’s most exciting is that this year we're in the visionary quadrant. This means that Yellowfin is now recognized for being an innovator in the BI space. We bring products to market that other people follow and that have something different to offer customers of BI software.

For me personally, it's real validation and recognition for all the hard work that we've done and the innovation that we've brought to market around analytics.

Innovation culture

The culture of our business is very much wrapped around enjoying innovation. This means a lot of time is spent just chewing the fat about what we could do differently and that drives our innovation.

This culture comes from constantly empathizing with our customers. We always ask what problem are we trying to solve? Can we do it differently? Does it add value to the experience that someone has with big data and analytics? We’re constantly pushing ourselves to think differently for the sake of our customers.

For example, we often take one component of our platform and rethink it because you can learn how to do things differently from your past mistakes. In contrast, some vendors are driven by a business model that is designed to sell, so they wait until their customers complain before they change anything. Other vendors reach the height of their innovation naturally but they never rethink their model, take Microsoft Word for example. They have lots of new features but the majority of users only use about 20% of this functionality. 

While it’s an exceptional outcome to be recognized as visionary by Gartner, what’s really important to me is what it means for our customers. 

What you want isn't always what you need

If you’re looking for an innovative BI solution, the Visionary quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant is interesting but it’s not necessarily the best starting point. Before looking at the quadrant, stop and think about what outcomes you’re trying to achieve and what problems you're trying to solve rather than going straight to use cases.

Too often people come to us wanting a dashboard and we actually have to help them understand what they want from their data and what they want to achieve in their organization. How do their people want to consume data or interact with it? Who's the audience? This means we often have to take people on a journey to help them understand what they need and what’s possible; often, that’s more than a dashboard. 

Signals is a really good example of this. It’s one of those products that people don’t get instantaneously. That’s because it's not a pervasive use case in organizations yet, so the vast majority of people are still trying to understand what it does, why they would use it, and how their lives could be different. In five years’ time people won't even think about it; they’ll just know that they need an automated analysis product. 

Look for vendors who will best solve your problems

Once you know what problems you need to solve, then look at the vendors in the space that are best suited to solving your problems. If having a competitive advantage and being different is important to your business then you should look to vendors in Gartner’s Visionary quadrant as you’ll uncover really interesting solutions that can help your organization. 

Yellowfin’s vision has been to rethink the way people consume data. That’s why we’ve brought a suite of innovative products like Signals, Stories, Present and our collaboration features to the market.

Now we’re finally being recognized as leading the market for these innovations. It’s an acknowledgment of our vision, but more importantly, it recognizes that our customers love our product because it gives them new ways to analyze and consume data and that’s an exceptional outcome.