Yellowfin Brings BI, Analytics as a Service to the Channel

Melbourne, Australia-based Yellowfin aims to ease the chore of analytics and remove analysis fatigue from the world of big data.

The company has introduced Yellowfin Signals, a platform designed to automatically discover and surface the most important changes in data, in real time.

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is how to interpret critical data and bring forth insights from all of the noise. Yellowfin has recognized the shortcomings of traditional BI dashboards and reporting systems, which often fail to identify the relevance of certain data feeds and apply those to projects at hand. In many cases, human bias and trend identification impact the quality of business analytics, leading many organizations to make decisions based on faulty premises.

With that in mind, more and more businesses are turning to experts to help alleviate their analytics problems, creating opportunities for channel players, who seek to do more than just build dashboards.

“We’re taking dead aim at dashboards because they fail to deliver on their promise. They should move businesses forward — not make them wait,” said Yellowfin BI CEO Glen Rabie. “Yellowfin Signals automatically finds what dashboards miss, so users know what is going on in their business as it happens.”

Glen Rabie

Glen Rabie

Yellowfin Signals seeks to remove the incidence of data misinterpretation from the process by incorporating pattern-detection heuristics instead of threshold-based alerts; in other words, the solution uses machine learning and real-time data monitoring to automatically identify statistically significant deviations. Signals does not rely on human-defined, static thresholds to trigger actions, eliminating one of the biggest shortcomings of traditional analytics platforms.

Yellowfin Signals is able to accomplish that by shifting the analytics model from a static event to a continuous data-monitoring system, where automated processes examine live data looking for significant changes. Using machine learning, the system is able to determine the changes in data are important or relevant to operations. What’s more, identified patterns are then processed across all data sets, looking for additional relevance and actionable information.

Simply put, Signals brings forth the context needed to make analytics relevant. It’s only one part of an actionable BI equation; visualizing the data brings forth additional challenges. Yellowfin uses SIgnals to drive Yellowfin Stories, a concept meant to bring data to life. Yellowfin Stories brings a data-centric narrative to the visualization process.

Yellowfin Stories works with dashboard and visualization solutions, such as QLIK and Tableau, allowing solution providers to create custom analytics solutions that bring measurable value to their customers. That is a concept which can allow solution providers to become the catalyst for definitive business intelligence that can shift the way that BI is applied in business.

“While dashboards can streamline decisions, they don’t always provide enough context for the data they share and, if not done correctly, can lead to different interpretations,” said Barbara Peck, principal analyst, Nucleus Research. “That basically defeats the purpose. To be successful, dashboards need to collect information – both internal and external – into one common place and deliver the metrics aligned to the project. Yellowfin Stories has a different approach that lets the user collect information in one place – including signals and reports from different vendors – to reduce ambiguity and provide a clear, common interpretation of BI results leading to real-time feedback and faster, better decisions.”

Yellowfin is growing its channel with a reseller program designed to educate partners and help them deliver analytics solutions that actually bring value to partners’ clients.

“The ease of doing business with Yellowfin was the deciding factor for us to partner with Yellowfin,” said Leon McNamara, CEO, Latitude Software.