New Enterprise Reporting and Analysis Tool

Gartner predicts a 10 fold increase in the amount of information stored in Business IT systems over the next 5 years. They believe that successful BI strategies will ensure that BI users are able to customise and share this information through tools that they can effortlessly use.

What business people want is secure and easy access to their data – through personalised dashboards, charting and analysis plus the ability to write their own reports when they need to. Yellowfin has the capabilities of a BI tool as well as the ability for business professionals to construct and build their own reports within minutes.

“The Yellowfin development team came from a Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing background and were staggered by the high cost and complexity of implementing products such as Cognos and Business Objects” said Australian marketing manager Mark Jarzebowski. “Faced with these issues, rollouts are traditionally limited to a chosen few – resulting in information silos within organisations. Yellowfin seeks to address this by providing cost effective web based reporting for the entire organisation and breaking down those information barriers.”

In a market segment that has some very strong incumbents Yellowfin is changing the competitive landscape through lower cost of ownership, user friendliness and reduced IT resource requirements.

Java based Yellowfin dovetails into any standard relational database and outputs pure html allowing it to be used with only a web browser. It sits along side corporate applications and databases and can create reports and analysis from a mixture of data sources.

There is a data abstraction layer that allows technical users to create a view of data sources that is more friendly and meaningful to business orientated users. For example, a database field such as CustID can be presented to the user with a friendlier name such “Customer Identifier” together with a detailed description of what it means and how it should be used for reporting. The data can also be pre-filtered so that the business users see only the data that is of interest and that they are authorised to view.

Initial reactions have been very promising with a large law firm and a government department among the first customers.

“As an initial step we showed the software to some of our friends in the BI business” said Jarzebowski. “To our surprise where we expected constructive criticism we received requests to become resellers”.