Idera, Inc. automates and modernizes company-wide reporting with Yellowfin BI
Background
Founded in 1999, Idera, Inc. is the parent company of several global B2B software productivity brands whose solutions enable technical users to do more with less, faster. Idera, Inc. provides these software tools across a range of functions, including application development, data administration, and test management solutions, helping customers achieve their strategic goals.
Idera, Inc. brands span three divisions (Database Tools, Developer Tools, and Test Management Tools) with products used by millions of community members and more than 50,000 customers worldwide, including some of the largest healthcare, financial services, retail, and technology companies. One of these companies is Yellowfin BI, who joined Idera, Inc. as part of its Developer Tools division in 2021.
“The ability to get everyone on the same page and have a platform that’s visually appealing, extremely easy for the users to navigate through, and endless customization options, was significant.”
Chris Scorese, Product Manager, Idera, Inc.
Challenge
Legacy reporting processes that required modernization
In 2021, Idera, Inc. required an update for its internal analytics and reporting capability as part of its ongoing modernization initiatives. Core to this objective was a growing need to create a unified reporting system for all of the company’s different business units, teams and brands.
Previously, Idera, Inc’s faced three specific challenges with its in-house reporting efforts:
- Inconsistency in terms of reporting formats and user experience
- Highly manual report updating processes, which proved time-consuming
- Reliance on non-updated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and IT to update them
In addition, Idera, Inc had limited pre-existing charting and data visualization capability, which made their reports not as easily digestible as management teams and departments wanted. Some reporting within systems like Salesforce offered more functionality, but these required Idera users to have expensive Salesforce accounts, and created minor data silos of their own.
To address these recurring pain-points, IDERA’s in-house data analytics team spent three years building a data warehouse to better centralize its reporting for consumers, and connected some of the company’s reports to the data warehouse via Excel sheets to automate the process.
“IDERA’s data warehouse was used for everything from production data for our applications to organizational-wide reporting data,” explained Chris Scorese, Product Manager at Idera. “The data warehouse’s primary function was to be a single source of truth for all our company data.”
Unfortunately, Excel reports connected to Idera, Inc’s data warehouse still took a lot of time to update, leading to many users still having different versions of the reports. This necessitated a new, next-step data solution, which Chris was tasked with leading as the Senior Data Analytics Warehouse Manager.
“Ultimately, we wanted one location with always up-to-date data, but also a way that everyone can consume critical data and not have to create their own reports. The next logical step was finding the right BI tool to integrate that would bring everyone to the same spot,” said Chris.
Solution
Feature-rich BI platform that is cost-effective and user-friendly
Chris worked with multiple teams across Idera, Inc., including finance, marketing, product, and sales, to ascertain their core requirements, and inform his search for the best analytics solution.
The initial vendor selection consisted of Google Data Studio (GDS), Power BI and Amazon Quicksight, but Chris and his team quickly discovered some incompatibilities with their solutions.
“We ruled out Quicksight due to its lack of reporting capabilities we needed from a BI tool,” said Chris. “GDS proved to be minimally sufficient, but its user interface (UI) was not ideal, and proved costly to connect our SQL Server data warehouse to it via additional third party tools.”
Because both tools were geared toward more simplified reporting, Chris focused on finding full-featured BI tools that could meet both its capability and cost requirements. “Right around this time is when Yellowfin joined the Idera family, and we decided to insert it into our Proof of Concept (PoC) process to compare Yellowfin against Power BI, based on their extensive functionality.”
Implementation
Embedded analytics platform with flexible and familiar reporting architecture
Chris’s data team conducted an extensive comparison between Yellowfin and Power BI, before deciding on Yellowfin based on its user experience and features. “Yellowfin felt more natural to someone with any amount of SQL or database experience, and easier to create more complicated reports because it is more closely aligned with SQL, whereas Power BI uses DAX,” said Chris. “Yellowfin also made combining data sources easier by using JOINS and subqueries, and ultimately clicked significantly quicker for our data team because it is based on SQL.”
Once the decision was made to move forward with Yellowfin, Chris set to work creating a new reporting process and integrating Yellowfin with the existing data warehouse. He and his team proved pivotal in helping the company’s many different departments and management start adopting Yellowfin as their main BI tool for their reporting and decision-making processes.
“Within a couple months, we had all kinds of reports for all different teams built within Yellowfin, and they’re all automated,” said Chris. “Every time we created something, it was kind of like bringing on new Yellowfin users through the company, and we could see adoption growing week over week, month over month, and there was always good reviews and feedback for us to hear.”
Results
Modernized embedded analytics for consistent, automated, user-friendly reporting
Yellowfin’s integration was transformative for Idera, Inc and its many business users, who now have access to several sophisticated analytics features for their reporting and data consumption needs, all in one unified analytics tool:
- Action-based dashboards and hundreds of charts and graphs for visualization
- Automated reporting and scheduling helping to reduce time-to-insight
- Consistent reporting format and consumption experience without need for IT
“Having sophisticated dashboards and critical data at people’s fingertips, whenever they wanted, was something our company didn’t have prior, and that was the biggest help,” said Chris. “The ability to get everyone on the same page and have a platform that’s visually appealing, extremely easy for the users to navigate through, and endless customization options, was significant.”
In addition to its features, Yellowfin improved performance around report loading times. “There’s a big difference between a user having to wait 2 seconds for a report to load versus 8 seconds,” said Chris. “Having great performance sitting on top of our data warehouse was a plus for Idera.”
From Chris and the data team at Idera, Inc’s point-of-view the biggest long-term benefits of Yellowfin being integrated as its new organization-wide BI tool boiled down to two key areas:
“Number one was getting the reporting automated, always one version of it, and in one spot, aligning with our intention for the data warehouse to be a single source of truth for data in the company. Not only did it make everyone else’s lives easier, but we also saved significantly on costs, which we previously needed when hiring contractors to keep our Excel reports updated.”
“The second big benefit was we created some reports that were either not possible to create with just Excel or current reporting, or it took a week to do so. Those reports are now updated every day, minimum once a day, and now available all the time. So that was a big help.”
Future
Idera, Inc continues to refine its embedded Yellowfin analytics dashboard and reporting modules as users get more accustomed to the tooling,
“For some users, we have taken the next step to automatically email important reports to certain stakeholders, which was a pretty big hit, not only to have the reporting and updated data, but to be automated to improve time-to-insight,” said Chris.
With inquiries from users about adding Yellowfin’s unique data storytelling features (Stories and Present) and natural language query search tool (Guided NLQ), Idera, Inc are at just the beginning of their analytics modernization journey, and well equipped with Yellowfin’s suite.
See for yourself
Let us show you the best analytics product on the market with the only analytics platform that combines action based dashboards, automated business monitoring and data storytelling capability.
Get a Demo