The recent acquisition of Yellowfin by Idera is a surprise for many, but there is a lot that makes sense in this exciting deal. In this blog, Yellowfin founder Glen Rabie explains the move.
Having founded Yellowfin in 2003, and grown the business to where it is today - fully bootstrapped - I felt that to compete globally against our incredibly well-funded competition that something had to change. That change turned out to be handing over the reins to Idera, to allow the next chapter of Yellowfin to occur.
I am incredibly proud of the Yellowfin we built. The level of innovation we brought to the market was unprecedented. There were so many firsts that users of many analytic products simply take for granted: Integrated mapping, collaboration, automated analysis, embeddability, stories and our last release of Guided NLQ (Natural Language Query).
Ultimately, we were driven to find solutions to the problem of low adoption, by business users, of BI tools. We thought differently and were willing to radically change the paradigm. No wonder we were recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as Visionary for two years in a row (hopefully we go for a three-peat!).
It was not just the product, however. We built a great business focused on going to market via partners. Both software businesses that integrate Yellowfin into their applications and system integrators that deliver unique analytical solutions to their enterprise customers. I personally got a great deal of satisfaction from working with and developing deep relationships with so many of our terrific partners across the globe.
From Japan to the UK and Europe, Latin America and of course North America - it's been quite an amazing story for an Australian startup.
But it is now time for the next chapter of Yellowfin. Idera can add a lot of value to the Yellowfin story. They have a similar philosophy to scaling with partners, and they have an amazing set of adjacent products in their portfolio that will truly create a differentiated stack in the analytics market. For example, the combination of Wherescape, a data warehouse ETL automation solution, and Fusion Charts, a JavaScript charting engine, and Qubole, an open data lake Platform, all of which bring additional world class capability to our customers and partners. It truly is an impressive stack.
Idera’s focus on software developer use cases also means that Yellowfin will continue to accelerate in the embedded space and likely see a significant focus on streamlining the integration process and enhancing the DevOps management of the application.
Yellowfin, in conjunction with the rest of the Idera stack, now not only has everything needed to deploy a great embedded analytical solution but also a company behind it that has a deep understanding of the full software development life cycle and everything needed to support that.
To step away from Yellowfin has been a big decision and not one made lightly. A huge amount of my life has been tied to it. I am so passionate about the business and the product but as founders, Justin and I, believed we have taken the business as far as we can. I will be forever grateful for the experience I had with Yellowfin. All the amazing people I got to work with, the huge amount of fun we had, and the massive challenges we had to build a brand in a highly competitive market.
I look forward to seeing where Idera takes what we lovingly built. The potential for the future is vast. While being slightly cheeky, I really think that NLQ can redefine how people do analytics. Yellowfin has so much to offer!
Many of you met Atanas Popov, who is the General Manager to take over the reins from me. He is super excited about the opportunities ahead and I encourage customers and partners to connect with him. The roadmap we have is well aligned with Idera’s priorities, and I am confident that customers will continue to receive fantastic value from their Yellowfin investments.
NLQ speaks primarily in metrics, but I wish there is a simple option that says, “the future is bright!”
