This month has been an exciting one with the whole business focused on our new Yellowfin 7.4 release that comes out on October 31.
Yellowfin release 7.4 is set to transform BI
I’ve spent most of the past month engaging with analysts around the globe, giving them previews and taking them through what release 7.4 has in store. The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive, with some analysts telling us that we’ve hit a home run and are leading the pack, particularly when it comes to augmented data discovery.
Augmented data discovery is very different to what our competitors are offering, but it’s not just the new features that have impressed industry analysts, it’s also the way that we’ve addressed the problem. We’re solving for multiple use cases – the data analyst and the business user – and each will have a very different experience depending on how they use our product. This gives the product more depth and breadth compared to a single point solution.
We’ve also added ETL to our stack, which strengthens our platform by enabling us to add data science platforms such as H2O and incorporating data science components like Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) and Portable Format for Analytics (PFA). This means Yellowfin is now an end-to-end platform for data scientists – they can manipulate their data and then take it all the way through to deliver value to business users much faster. Essentially, we’ve productionized the work that data scientists do and added more value to our platform.
This is significant when you consider that about 90% of a data scientist’s work today is disposable. Our platform will make their work more efficient and ensures that data scientists can get value into the hands of the business user quicker. We approached the development of this feature from the perspective of the data scientist – an approach that analysts have told us is unique for a BI vendor and creates a new use case for our product.
Overall, this is a significant release for Yellowfin. It will change our positioning in the market and the way we compete, which is really exciting.
Sales continues to expand
Our sales team continues to grow with a few new hires in Asia Pacific. We’ve also seen an uptick in sales momentum in the US as we come out of the northern summer.
One great deal to highlight this month is the Munro Mufflers. The US team closed a deal with Munro in October that is significant in terms of the size of its deployment – Yellowfin will roll out to tens of thousands of users in over 1,000 stores and corporate offices. It was a quick deal that we literally snatched out of the hands of one of our competitors. Munro Mufflers saw what Yellowfin had to offer and were impressed with where we were going, so we managed to clinch the deal in less than four weeks. That’s a great outcome not only for us but also for our new customers.
Launching our new positioning
Marketing has also been hard at work. They have launched the new positioning for the Yellowfin brand and our product (“Getting to the why faster”). It’s been a big job and marketing has delivered by understanding both our product and where the business is heading. Our branding now reflects our laser-focus on reducing the time to insight for our business users. We want users to get immediate value from their BI and analytics tools – this is the essence of what Yellowfin has set out to achieve and it’s exciting to see it come to life.
As a result of this repositioning and other marketing activity we’ve seen an uplift in our inbound leads of nearly 50% over the past couple of months. This will have a profound impact on our sales capability moving forward, setting us up for an awesome end to the year.