The last 12 months have been tremendous for Yellowfin. We’ve introduced Signals, Stories, a new dashboard build, mobile app and many new improvements to the platform. There is no one else in the market that brings together all of these types of products and it means we’re diverging from our competitors. Our competitors think far more about the analytical experience, while we care about the data consumer and build products for them. So over the next 12 months, we’re going to focus on three things that are important to business users – collaboration, automation, and consumption.
Collaborate
The first area of focus for us is improving the social and collaborative elements of Yellowfin. We were one of the first BI companies to incorporate collaborative features and our timeline is now a big part of that. Over the next year, we’re going to reimagine the timeline experience so it will become the central hub of the experience that a business user has with Yellowfin.
I believe that users will use dashboards less going forward because they will get the information they need through other mechanisms, whether that be Stories, Presentations, or Signals. As there won’t be a compelling need for a user to log in and see a dashboard anymore, we want to improve their timeline experience because we believe that’s how business users will start their day. We want people to be able to drive action through their timeline and have a really compelling experience through their feed.
By encouraging action out of data people collaborate more. They comment on things, discuss data and end up being more data-driven and data-led. This is why we want to focus on collaboration and our timeline in particular.
Automate
Automation is our second area of focus. While I think we’ve done a tremendous job with Signals, we’re now looking at extending our competitive advantage by improving it and bringing in more algorithms that look for new changes in data. We’re also looking at what other parts of our product suite we can automate.
Consumption
Finally, we want to drive analytics at the point of consumption. This involves helping organizations, whether they be software vendors or direct customers, to embed Yellowfin directly into their workflows, business processes, and applications. This will allow a business user to get the benefits of data directly within a workflow rather than having to go into a separate application to do some analysis and then coming back.
For example, if you’re in a procurement workflow to do a new order because inventory is low, you should be able to see all of the analytics about this in your procurement application. Yellowfin can either enable an enterprise to do that or a software vendor. Either way, we want to make it super simple for users to investigate something within their process rather than having to leave it to do the analysis. Ultimately, it will give data consumers a better experience so they can make better decisions and take immediate action.
By focusing on collaboration, automation, and consumption of data, I believe we’ll continue to diverge from our competitors. While our competitors are focused on the minutia of dashboards and what the data analyst needs, we want to help business users consume data better. So over the next 12 months, you’ll see Yellowfin focus on how we can improve every aspect of our application to make it more relevant to business users.
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