Glen Rabie, CEO of global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor Yellowfin, has said that the next iteration of Yellowfin’s BI solution will fundamentally challenge current report creation processes.
Rabie made the comments in an interview with independent BI analyst, Claudia Imhoff, at the 2013 Pacific Northwest BI Summit in Grants Pass, Oregon.
From collaboration to content creation
“Over the last few releases, we’ve been really focused on Collaborative BI, and building out a fantastic suite of features around how people share and use information within an organization and ultimately make decisions,” said Rabie. “For this next release, we started looking at how people create reports [and] do ad-hoc reporting – how people go about creating content from scratch.
“There are a number of steps and processes in that whole scenario – from connecting into data, to creating a metadata layer, building out the actual reports, [as well as] publishing, distributing and sharing that information.”
New technology means new possibilities
Rabie explained that when Yellowfin was initially developed, the content creation process was limited by the browser-based technology available at the time.
“[Because of those limitations], we had to essentially develop a multi-staged method to achieve that whole content creation process,” said Rabie. “And so with HTML 5, and a lot of new Web technologies now available, we’ve been able to compress that process. We’ve been able to make content creation far more intuitive and simple.
“Functionally, it’s just as rich – we’re not taking anything away. But, we’re using all this great new UI technology to shorten the whole process so that users get instantaneous feedback about what they’re doing.
“You’d typically see this kind of content creation in a desktop environment, and so we’re bringing that really rich user experience into the browser – which I think is terribly exciting.”
User feedback drove content creation rethink
Rabie said that Yellowfin’s decision to transform its content creation process was inspired by the experiences of its customers – a valuable source of feedback not available to the business when it formed back in 2003.
“I think when you start on a journey, you don’t understand everything you need to do,” said Rabie. “You can have some sense of it, but it’s really only when it’s being used in [the real world] and people are trying to achieve [real outcomes] that you can learn from that and take it onboard.
“We’ve seen what our customers do, and want to be able to do, [and so] we understand a lot more about what we want to achieve. This is our opportunity to rewrite that whole piece from the ground up. We’re basically going right back to the start – reimagining this process and rethinking what we’re doing with the benefit of hindsight.”
Yellowfin is due to release the next version of its BI software in November 2013.
About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Yellowfin is headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia, offering a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com
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