Launching Yellowfin Cloud with Toustone
One of the great initiatives that we’ve launched over the last few months has been Yellowfin Cloud. We’ve done this in conjunction with one of our partners – Toustone.
Toustone is a partner who is powering the Yellowfin Cloud product in Australia. They have been a reseller partner for a couple of years and now we have extended that relationship by developing this platform with them.
This is a great opportunity for our customers who don’t want to deploy Yellowfin on premises or via a private cloud deployment. Any customers that prefer a hosted cloud option can now access Yellowfin through Toustone.
We encourage our partners to take advantage of opportunities
Our partnership model is a key differentiator for Yellowfin and our relationship with Toustone is a case in point.
When it came to building a partnership, Toustone has admitted to us that Qlik was initially their first choice. They had worked with the product and knew it well. But Qlik’s commercial model made it impossible for them to build their business. It had too many constraints that didn’t give them the opportunity to substantially grow their business. This gave us the opportunity to step in and build a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yellowfin’s model is about encouraging our partners to grow. We’re not there to take their business, and that was a huge differentiator for Toustone. Then they looked under the hood of our product and liked what they saw. Over the last couple of years, Toustone has gone from being a reseller to a partner we have grown with.
Together we identified that there was an opportunity in cloud solutions and have built a cloud platform that we can deliver to our customers. We are encouraging all of our partners to think about building out cloud businesses. After all, if their customer base is demanding cloud then they should be able to package a solution that they can offer and roll out to multiple customers easily and quickly.
This differentiates us from many of our competitors because they want to own the cloud solution. To do cloud well you need to provide services and manage them. While many other cloud BI vendors have hundreds of people in a back room servicing and building reports for people, that’s not Yellowfin – our job is to build great software.
Our partners have great BI and analytical skills. They know how to service and consult to customers so it makes sense to let them provide those services to our customers. It’s a much better outcome for our customers than if we tried to manage the process ourselves, so we are delighted to work closely with our partner base.
Yellowfin Cloud has received positive responses
Toustone manages the Yellowfin Cloud service on our behalf through Amazon. This means that customers can run Yellowfin Cloud straight out of the box (start a free trial here if you’re interested). The product is packaged well and can be delivered rapidly to customers. It’s a valuable solution in our overall product set.
While it’s still early days for Yellowfin Cloud, in the first month we brought 30 customers onboard and the platform shows a lot of promise to grow rapidly. It’s a fantastic initiative and one that I believe will become a substantial business for us. It’s also a good example of how Yellowfin helps our partners to build bigger businesses by enabling them to manage and deliver services to our customers.