May update: Yellowfin’s strategic direction for 2019
May has been a fantastic month and the highlight for me – and for most the organization – was the strategy conference that we held here in Melbourne. This was an opportunity to get the global team together and talk about the future direction of our business.
All of our regional leaders came to Melbourne so that we could plan and think about where the organization is heading for the next 12 months. We essentially took the organization apart and put it back together again, focusing on the entire customer journey. We considered what expectations our customers have of us throughout the buying and execution cycle right through to renewal. This gave everyone line of sight over how we impact our customers and what we need to do moving forward.
It was also a great opportunity to align the entire organization behind our mission and vision. We now understand how we’re going to execute our strategy next year so we can continue to grow at the same rapid pace.
Another great month in sales
From a sales perspective, we had a solid month in terms of billings. The highlight was a deal with Alaska USA Federal Credit Union. They’re one of the largest credit unions in the United States with over 651,000 members. Like most organizations, they’re trying to understand their business better. They’re a complex organization, spread geographically across a multitude of sites so they needed a centralized BI application that can be deployed in a decentralized environment. That’s a real sweet spot for Yellowfin.
What really stood out for me was the way we executed this deal. The engagement our people had and how they worked with the customer to understand their needs and show them the solution was impeccable. Obviously, the customer was also impressed with our technology, its ability to connect to their data sources and deliver the outcomes they wanted. Through our sales process, they knew that we understood their business and specific challenges.
On the sales front, we also hired some new regional sales managers in Europe and the United States this month who will build our capability to deliver and execute in those regions.
May the force be with (our new release)
On May 4th we released a significant patch – our first after 7.4. We did a lot of work on the data transformation module that will give our users extra power. The most significant improvement was with the amount of data that you can push through and see in preview mode. This improves capability for data engineers who are building out data flows. These changes have given us a really strong data transformation module that delivers for both data science and generic data transformation capabilities.
We also enhanced the process for assisted insights based on feedback we’ve had from end-users. These enhancements will continue to help our customers ahead of our next major release later in 2018.