Yellowfin Partner Spotlight: Blacklight Solutions

Founded in 2009, Blacklight Solutions is an applied analytics solutions company based in Austin, Texas. Blacklight became Yellowfin’s first implementation partner in North America in 2009, and since then has been a resource for companies seeking to establish or modernize their business intelligence capabilities. 

In August 2022, Chance Coble of Blacklight Solutions hosted a webinar on “Delivering Embedded Business Intelligence at Scale”. In this webinar, he showed attendees how to evaluate and select platforms to push your business analytics capabilities forward for their users’ benefit, while avoiding the investment hurdle of an entirely custom developed solution - making it possible to deliver an embedded BI solution at scale.

Watch the on-demand webinar session to learn more.

What Can Blacklight Solutions Do for You?

Blacklight Solutions helps clients solve problems by making their data work for them. 

Today, businesses are facing increasing operational demands around processing, managing, analyzing and applying data. Blacklight Solutions creates innovative solutions that help companies scale to meet these critical information management needs and find new applications for owned data streams. This Yellowfin partner leverages its own technology that glues data processing tools together to provide seamless integration and meaningful analytics.  

Sample Project #1: ACL

ACL provides technology products and services for governance, risk management, and compliance. The team at ACL was looking to extend their ACL GRC cloud platform by introducing extensive custom reporting and dashboards. Embedding and styling a business intelligence tool would help accelerate the content they could generate and get valuable features into their product. However, the unstructured and sensitive nature of the underlying data sources, and the limitations of business intelligence tools forced them to custom engineer a reporting solution.

ACL engaged Blacklight Solutions and using proprietary technology Blacklight integrated Yellowfin and facilitated rapid report and dashboard creation within one month.

Key challenges: A roadblock integrating BI on non-traditional data sources, and custom-built reporting that was expensive and time-consuming for the team.

Key accomplishments include: 

• Created a live query endpoint for BI-generated SQL-to-Web Services returning unstructured data. 
• Identified best practices in BI tool deployment in a cloud environment
• Provided best-in-class support of solution with rapid-response tickets for incident tracking, phone support, and even screen sharing walkthroughs to help resolve incidents

The resulting product has since been a success in the market with enterprises looking to gain deep insights on their GRC information. The product is robust, data-rich and profitable.

Sample Project #2: QuadROI

QuadROI transforms unstructured compliance documentation into highly accessible industry intelligence, which is leveraged by utilities and their partners to maximize return on investment. In order to present their intelligence, they had embedded a business intelligence tool into their product. The offering was a hit, and as their market adopted their technology the team became fully subscribed accommodating success.

During this period, many technical efforts were shelved in order to deal with the increase in customer demand and to support the system. QuadROI called on Blacklight Solutions to help, and engaged Blacklight for a Quickstart package to relieve the burden for the team while overcoming some of the challenges. 

Key challenges: Success occupied the team and left important technical tasks unattended. QuadROI required advice on future resourcing and risk mitigating strategies for scale. Finally, QuadROI also needed to upgrade a maturing BI server to a supported version.

Key accomplishments include:

• Upgraded BI Server to a supported version
• Improved performance and scale of the BI server
• Provided both on-side and remote resourcing to increase productivity

At the end of the Quickstart, QuadROI had improved performance, an upgraded BI server and received expert advice on future risk mitigation.

Sample Project #3: Aquent

Aquent implemented an enterprise scale business intelligence solution using Yellowfin. As the value of the solution grew and Aquent’s needs expanded, the internal business intelligence team became over-subscribed. The CIO engaged Blacklight Solutions to accelerate a set of important projects and bring back into view a set of stretch goals for the team that would facilitate efficiency in sales management and executive insights into revenue sources.

Key challenges: The Aquent team was oversubscribed with urgent projects, and needed to apply new resources with expertise in Yellowfin to maximize value from report and dashboard content.

Key accomplishments include:

• Created pull of data from MongoDB into Redshift for data warehousing
• Identified gaps in data that could be filled for additional reporting and insight
• Implemented a variety of secured report and dashboard content 

About Chance Coble

Blacklight is led by president Chance Coble, who has been focused on unlocking the value from data his entire career. At Blacklight Solutions, Chance transforms the way organizations work with their data and how they use it to create value for their products and teams. For the past 15 years he has been engaged as a consultant with the Fortune 50 in the United States as well as internationally by some of the most successful organizations in the world. His broad experience in analytical and business intelligence platforms combined with his technology background has enabled him to identify solutions to his clients’ most challenging business problems. 

He was instrumental in the development of Yellowfin North America and was part of its founding team. Chance was Senior Scientist for Ideal Innovations, an award-winning inventions company where he conducted R&D for clients such as the United States DoD as well as foreign governments producing real-world solutions currently used around the globe. Chance has a B.S. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin as well as an M.S. in Biomedical Informatics from The University of Texas at Houston.