I’ve just come back from a pretty big trip. While it’s not the first time I’ve been to the US, Germany, the UK and Japan, in many ways this was a trip of firsts for me. The trip came off the back of the launch of Yellowfin 9 and the feedback I received about this release was exceptional. It’s the first time that I’ve ever had customers running up to me to say that they can’t wait to migrate to our platform.
Looking forward to 2020, there are five things I think we’ll see happen more. We’ve seen a ton of consolidation this year and we’ll see more next year. There are about 75 front-end vendors in the BI space and the reality is that they can’t all survive in the market as it is today. Salesforce purchased Tableau recently and a lot of smaller vendors have already been bought.
With businesses becoming more data-led, there's now an expectation that you will use numbers when talking about strategy and the state of your business. You can’t do that by just looking at a dashboard because they don’t provide any context to the data. You may see that revenue has gone up but it doesn’t tell you what’s happening in the business or how different parts are performing.
There's a strong perception that numbers will simply drive action but they don't. Look at most dashboards and they’re designed to tell you about your data but they don’t prompt you to do anything with it. That’s the missing piece in dashboard design.
The last 12 months have been tremendous for Yellowfin. We’ve introduced Signals, Stories, a new dashboard build, mobile app and many new improvements to the platform. There is no one else in the market that brings together all of these types of products and it means we’re diverging from our competitors. Our competitors think far more about the analytical experience, while we care about the data consumer and build products for them.
Seek, who is one of our customers, came to us with a laundry list of functionality that their developers wanted. Like many enterprises, they have their own developers who are asked to deliver a design for their UX team and they need and environment where they can do that. They didn’t want us to worry about the UI, they just wanted the ability to code what they wanted directly into the Yellowfin dashboard environment, so we created Yellowfin 9 Code Mode which is our developer platform.
Do more with your dashboards. If, like me, you are someone who uses data to make decisions (what we call a business user), I suspect your experience with analytics and in particular dashboards is mixed verging on the ‘not that great’.
The next Yellowfin release is absolutely huge. We’ve focused on the experience of data consumers within organizations with three new features - code mode for dashboards, Present and our new mobile app.
Not so long ago, our CFO was looking at changing our financial system and it reminded me of a similar situation that happened when I worked at National Australia Bank many years ago. We changed our entire ERP because the organization needed to slice and dice their data differently. What they could have done instead was use analytics differently to extend the life of the products they had, so that’s what we’ve done.
When it comes to automation in the BI industry, I think a lot of vendors are holding back. It’s entirely possible to automate the majority of what data analysts do today, but vendors are reluctant to do this because it would impact data analysts and they’re a big gatekeeper in the buying cycle of analytic software.
