Yellowfin launches Yellowfin 7 analytics platform: Makes enterprise-wide Data Discovery easy

SOURCE: Yellowfin

Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie, said that Yellowfin 7 “delivered beautiful, balanced and brilliant analytics software that makes stunningly simple enterprise-wide Data Discovery easy.”

The additions and enhancements of the release focused on five core technical capabilities, including improved content creation, multi-chart formatting, enriched administration, as well as new collaborative decision-making and mobile report authoring functionality.

“Yellowfin 7’s amazing new Data Discovery interface simplifies and enhances the self-service analytics experience, enabling our users to create BI content faster than ever before – on any device,” said Rabie.  “Our goal is to empower anyone to effortlessly interpret and act on business data in a way that actually makes reporting and analytics so natural and easy it’s a joy to use.”

Enhanced report authoring for instant insight

The all-new content creation module in Yellowfin 7 enables users to conduct real-time ad-hoc analysis on business data, generating immediate business insight.

“You’ve heard people talk-up self-service BI because of its ability to circumvent the IT bottleneck,” said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie. “With Yellowfin 7, we’ve stepped it up again.  We’ve completely redesigned and rebuilt the report authoring process, from the ground up, to enable independent Data Discovery.”

Yellowfin 7’s reconstructed interface for report creation and ad-hoc analysis includes a content creation canvas.  Any selected fields are instantaneously visualized on the canvas, enabling users to immediately see the result of their actions and attain instant insight.  Straightaway, users can understand if their selected metrics and dimensions have combined to create the desired report.

“Yellowfin 7’s new interface for analysis lets you instantly understand the impact of your data selections on the content you’re creating, empowering users to achieve deeper understanding in less time and build the most insightful BI content possible – every time,” said Rabie.

The all-new content creation module also offers users a more navigable interface for highly intuitive report building, which streamlines the steps required to create BI content.  Enhanced formatting controls make reporting content easier to configure for mass distribution, helping Yellowfin customers keep their content consistent with corporate styling demands.  And, advanced help features empower more people to author BI content.

Mobile report authoring supports anywhere, anytime ad-hoc analysis

Yellowfin 7 offers users the flexibility to create content and conduct ad-hoc analysis on the mobile device of their choice, through the browser, just as they would via their desktop computer.

“The ability to author reports via any mobile device empowers users to explore data and discover fresh insights anywhere and anytime,” said Rabie.  “This important update not only offers a seamless user experience, it enables true device independence by empowering users to conduct ad-hoc analysis whenever and wherever necessary.  We realize that people switch between a phone, tablet and laptop during a normal day and expect to be able to access the same information.  Yellowfin supports that reality.”

A new native iPhone application for Mobile BI – restyled in line with Apple’s iOS 7 update and released as part of Yellowfin 7 – improves the ability to access and share BI content on-the-go.  The new ‘Browse Page’ enables users to easily search, view and sort all of their BI content – from reports, to Storyboards, and even dashboards.

A new interface for viewing dashboard content brings Yellowfin’s new iPhone application into line with its existing native iPad application, allowing users to view all their dashboard tabs in one place.

Yellowfin offers customers the ability to receive mobile analytics out-of-the-box, on any device or platform at no additional cost, via native applications for the iPhone, iPad, hybrid HTML 5 application for Android devices or Web-browser.

Multi-chart formatting enables deeper insight from multiple perspectives

Yellowfin’s new multi-chart capability – included as part of Yellowfin 7’s all-new content creation module – allows users to create many charts from a single dataset, enabling fast data exploration and analysis from multiple perspectives.

“Significantly, this capability differs from that offered by other data visualization tools, which create a separate query for each visualization,” said Rabie.  “Architecturally, Yellowfin is quite different – it automatically aggregates on-the-fly to build its charts.  What this means is, from an end-customer perspective, the performance is far faster because there’s only one query hitting the database for multiple visualizations.  The ability to build multiple charts from a single dataset will also significantly reduce report-authoring time.  And importantly, deriving deeper multi-angled insights form a single dataset has never been faster or easier.”

Rabie explained that the vendor’s new output canvas, within Yellowfin 7’s overhauled report builder, enables users to drag-and-drop multiple charts onto a single space and arrange them side-by-side to create a dashboard type experience for data consumers.

“Having conducted their multi-chart analysis, users can then add these multiple reports together to produce multi-chart reports – which can be thought of as mini dashboards,” said Rabie.  “The charts and canvas itself can be easily resized, via drag-and-drop functionality, allowing users to create a customized view of their visualizations.”

Users will also be able to add a range of custom widgets to the output canvas, to provide additional context to selected data visualizations.  Custom widgets include text, images, annotations and links to external content.

“The inclusion of additional widgets offers improved flexibility, empowering users to quickly add associated content to support a rich and deeply insightful user experience,” said Rabie.

Yellowfin’s new ‘Auto Chart’ feature provides a guided charting user experience by instantly visualizing selected data via an automatically selected chart type.

“This feature builds the chart automatically for the user based on the dataset provided,” said Rabie.  “Instantaneous visualization of data selections enables users to see the result of their actions immediately, and attain instant insight.”

Rabie said the Auto Chart feature would ensure that users could always publish the most insightful reports, using the most appropriate visualizations.

“Never publish a sub-standard report again with Yellowfin 7,” said Rabie.

New Administration Console: Balancing the needs self-service Data Discovery and Enterprise IT

The new Yellowfin 7 Administration Console enables the Yellowfin analytics platform to balance the needs of Enterprise IT and self-service Data Discovery users.

“Yellowfin’s Administration Console has been completely re-written for Yellowfin 7, delivering an analytics platform that simultaneously supports the self-service needs of end-users while ensuring ease-of-management for IT personnel – even for enterprise-wide deployments,” said Rabie.  “We know that the most successful analytic implementations are pervasive.  To reach that goal, you cannot just focus on the needs of end-users.  To effectively and efficiently manage an enterprise-wide BI deployment, you’ve got to streamline the entire administration process.”

Yellowfin 7’s new Administration Console consolidates a range of management functions, delivering administrators a single comprehensive overview of their Yellowfin instance, to reduce the time and resources spent on BI administration. Key metrics such as usage statistics – including number of users, logins as well as dashboard and report views – enable administrators to easily optimize the management and usage of their Yellowfin environment.

“For Yellowfin 7, we’ve worked hard to produce an administration function that’s pleasurable to use – every component is quicker and easier to access and manage,” said Rabie.  “Now, you can access all your administration features, and even access critical success and management metrics, within a click. User management, default report themes, data security, usage statistics, scheduling, licensing and more – it’s all easily accessible and manageable.

“Yellowfin 7 strikes a fine balance between data exploration and enterprise administrative requirements.”

New decision widgets enhance collaborative decision-making capabilities

A series of decision widgets have been added to Timeline – Yellowfin’s personalized Facebook-esc feed, which catalogs a users’ activities within Yellowfin in real-time – to boost user engagement and make collaborative decision-making even easier.

“With collaboration and Yellowfin’s Timeline, you can comment on reports and create discussion topics that allow you to share ideas and data over time – as you would in a real ongoing discussion,” said Rabie. “In Yellowfin 7, we have also added the ability to make collaborative decisions, and record those decisions in order to improve the quality and transparency of organizational decision-making.”

Rabie said that Yellowfin 7’s collaborative features were designed to replicate natural decision-making processes.

“In Yellowfin 7, not only will users be able to engage in discussion threads and embed BI content into those discussions, they’ll be able to set resolution deadlines as well as vote on proposed actions.”

Rabie said it was important to introduce functionality into a BI platform that empowered users to intuitively turn insight and discussion into action.

“Without a decision, there’s no ROI for analytic software,” said Rabie. “So a BI solution needs to be more than just an enabler. For BI software to be successful, it must include a mechanism to assist decision-making, such as voting or polling, to help push conversation towards a specific, measurable and desirable course of action. That’s exactly what we’re helping our customers achieve with Yellowfin 7.”

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Yellowfin is headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia, offering a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com