The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans wafts through a funky coffee
shop, in Melbourne Australia. Glen Rabie settles in behind his Long
Machiatto singing the praises of Michale, the barista, above the din
of the coffee grinder. Melbourne is a town that takes its coffee
seriously. “A large Italian migrant population defined the coffee
experience here” says Rabie. And according to Rabie, just like its
love of coffee, Melbourne is the centre of development for Business
Intelligence applications.

Rabie a founder and CEO of Yellowfin, a Business Intelligence software
vendor that was recently voted one of the 25 rising stars that CIOs
must know about, senses my level of incredulity. Unperturbed he races
on with passion educating me on the changes to BI and some of the
applications that are helping to drive that change. Not only is
Melbourne the home of Yellowfin but also companies such as Space Time
Research and the world’s fastest ETL solution C-RX. The big change
coming is the drive to rapid deployment and ease of use, he tells me.

The problem is that I have heard it all before. Major vendors have
been talking about pervasive BI for years now and yet they have not
delivered on this. “That’s the point! BI needs to be turned on its
head” says Rabie. “None of the BI software architectures, or business
models, support making BI easy. Think about, traditional vendors have
partner eco-systems that are based on services, 30%+ of their own
revenue is services income (more if you look at open source). Where
is the financial incentive to develop BI solutions that are easy to
use and implement? Imagine trying to sell cars the way BI solutions
are sold. Sell the whole lot as parts with steering wheels and
dashboards as optional, high-end extras. Only a tiny minority of
people could buy this way, those with the time, resources and
expertise to purchase all the required parts and then put it
together. Yet, this is how the BI market is today. Vendors have
convinced their customers that this is the way to purchase. So we
have a multiplicity of products (at the presentation layer alone) such
as dashboards builders, OLAP tools, Report Writers, Schedulers and on
the list goes, and the poor customer has to put together. This is the
trouble with the vast majority of the BI market right now!”

So why is Yellowfin different? “Fundamentally in two ways”, says
Rabie. “Firstly we are passionate about developing software that is
incredibly easy to use. Ultimately BI is complex stuff but how do you
step back from that and ask yourself what parts of the interface get
in the way of a business user trying to access and explore their
data?” Yellowfin has truly dedicated itself to this task. Rabie is a
great believer of the hands on experience and convinces me to trial
the product. No demonstration, just a download link. My first
impression was that I must have missed something, as the download was
unconventionally small for an application that touts so much
functionality. Once installed though, my doubts were quashed.

Here was a BI application that was fully integrated and so intuitive,
that I finally got the point. The end user deals with a single
interface, no file systems, no various applications for specific
functions - everything in one application – and a user interface that
would make any Italian Designer weep into their latte with joy. After
just a few minutes I can see why a recent project at a Utility company
took just 8 weeks to roll out 120 reports and related dashboards to
500 users. Yellowfin has been designed from the ground up for rapid
deployment.

“The second point of differentiation is the Business model. Yellowfin
partners predominately with either software vendors wanting to embed a
BI application into their own application, or companies with domain
expertise who develop specific analytic applications for rapid
deployment. Forrester, recently noted that 60-80 of a BI project
spend was implementation – “well sure with old school products this is
the case but if you develop a partner base that pre-packages a
solution you create scale and reduce the time to market.

Both the OEM and the value-added reseller deliver packaged solutions
to their customers” says Rabie.
Yellowfin continues to make a splash in the BI market and rightly so.
This is one of the best interfaces I have ever used for managing the
data to dashboard life cycle. Not to rest on their laurels, Yellowfin
have a clear and well articulated product road map which really does
stretch the expectations of Business Intelligence capability via the
browser. With this sort of product and a great business model
Yellowfin has a great future and will really make an impact on its
competition.

reproduced by permission.

On Mar 17, 4:29*am, JTP PR <janinepellet... (AT) yahoo (DOT) ca> wrote:
Sent directly to yellowfin via their web site:

"Posting your ads in various discussion usenet newsgroups such as
comp.databases is considered spamming by many regulars. Your posting
history shows that you contribute nothing to the groups except this
noise.

There are places to post ads. (e.g. comp.databases.oracle.marketplace)
but you continue to ignore rules of netiquette.

I will be sure to let any manages I speak to about Yellowfin and their
poor advertising practices. If you annoy potential customer this way,
how much more annoying wil you be after you have the customer's
money?"