Posted by YellowFin Announcements on 11/18/06 04:02

(Association Press) - Get ready for the next wave of business
intelligence, which will once and for all take BI mainstream, with
query, reporting, and analysis dashboards on every desktop. According
to Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin "We are experiencing a new wave of
investment in BI by organisations in all industries. The current market
cycle is expected to last until 2020 and will be focused on expanding
the reach of BI to more users both inside and outside the organization
and a move to automate more decision processes by combining query,
reporting and analysis and advanced analytics functionality."

The evolving market is rapidly attracting new software vendors to
challenge the established players. Underlying the growth is the demand
for BI to become more mainstream, companies are looking for
alternatives to premium priced products. Leading the new pack is
Yellowfin, offering web based reporting that allows companies to
standardise BI across the enterprise, while providing easy and creative
ways for frontline and non-traditional BI users to access information
from transactional and warehouse systems.

"BI for the masses suffers the same problems that currently plague BI
for analysts and power users, unless software vendors change their
approach. What we have today are traditional BI tools that don't work
nearly as well as they should, even for analysts and power users. The
reason they haven't reached the masses is because most of the tools are
so difficult to use and reveal so little about the data that only power
users are willing to put up with them. Just as Google redefined the
internet by making search and therefore access to it easy ... the same
is true with the BI suite. Lowering the price is one thing and we are
starting to see that. However, usability and relevance are the key
things that need to be addressed", says Rabie.

Unlike traditional tools Yellowfin is making BI easy. Yellowfin
supports wider distribution across the organisation through ease of
use, ease of deployment and ease of integration into production
applications. "What we have done at Yellowfin, is to start with a
clean slate. Rather than look at where technology has taken BI
products today we have a vision for where they should be tomorrow,"
says Justin Hewitt, COO. "Our focus has been on the user experience
- let the technology do the hard work behind the scenes, and make BI
easy for the user."

Chris Hocking from Plumbing World was attracted to Yellowfin because it
is completely platform-independent, which suited Plumbing World's
mixed platform environment. However, when he began a trial of the
software Hocking was impressed by the level of support provided by
Yellowfin. "They came over and helped us to get it all set up.
Certainly their level support is one of the best I have received from
any organisation to date." It is not just the technology that has to
be easy to use. One of the key success factors for Yellowfin has been
the quality of its support. "We understand that when companies
purchase software what they are really buying is a service, and this
service is part of the total product which has to be easy," says
Hewitt

Since 2003 Yellowfin's mission of designing simple but powerful BI for
business people has been embraced. This has enabled Yellowfin's
expansion into Asia, Europe and North America. Next year will be a
pivotal period for Yellowfin's suite as companies depart from
traditional breed tools in favour of options that provide lower cost of
ownership, ease of use, SOA, and operational flexibility. Yellowfin is
well positioned to take advantage of this developing trend.
(Yellowfin.com.au)

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