Yellowfin Brings Collaborative Energy to Analytics and BI

We are happy to offer some insights on Yellowfin drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and BI focusing on mobile, embedded and collaborative capabilities. Because each is a critical aspect of modern business intelligence, we developed specific criteria for each in order to provide an in-depth look at features geared specifically to mobile, embedded and collaborative use.

In all of our Value Indexes we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Yellowfin and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Yellowfin BI’s product has a clean, flexible user interface that supports a wide variety of roles within the organization, adapting well to both novice and expert users. The data architecture relies on third-party commercial databases to hold the data being analyzed, which utilizes the power of the underlying database and doesn’t require moving the data to another data store. It has enterprise capabilities built into the platform, such as built-in approval processes as new data is brought into the system.

The product offers good support for a variety of personas ranging from IT to executives and managers, resulting in a fourth-place rank in the Usability category. Yellowfin provides a broad set of functionality across most of the areas evaluated in the Value Index, earning it a ranking of fourth in Capability. Yellowfin BI also has embedded collaboration features directly into the product including discussions among users and approval processes before content can be published.

MOBILE ANALYTICS & BI

Yellowfin provides native mobile applications for both iOS and Android. In addition, the responsive HTML displays can be accessed by other devices as well as iOS and Android tablets. The product performs well in our analyses, scoring above average in all of the capability subcategories we evaluated and earning it a ranking of fifth in Capability.

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS & BI

Yellowfin offers its products on premises and as a cloud service. The user interface is entirely browser-based. The data architecture relies on third-party commercial databases. Overall, Yellowfin ranks fifth in this Value Index.

The product performs well in our analyses, scoring above average in more than three-quarters of the capability subcategories we evaluated and earning it a ranking of fourth in Capability. The product is designed in a way that supports embedding, with explicit capabilities for white labeling as well as numerous, often finely grained objects and well-documented APIs.

COLLABORATIVE ANALYTICS & BI

Yellowfin, a Value Index Leader, has made significant investments in its collaborative analytics and BI capabilities. Overall, Yellowfin ranks third in both this Value Index and the Capability category. The vendor performed better than average in 11 of the 15 Capability subcategories evaluated.

The product includes social-media-style wall postings along with good annotation and commenting capabilities. Yellowfin also enables participants to assign and track tasks to completion. The product has good output options and delivery capabilities to get information into the hands of the right individuals. Yellowfin also provides robust alerting capabilities.

Yellowfin could further improve its impressive scores with better scorecarding and strategy management capabilities. Automated agents and recommendations could help guide actions and improve collaboration among individuals involved in the analytics process. Yellowfin did not provide as much information or tools as other vendors to support TCO/ROI analyses. Additional case studies and services information would help improve its ranking in Validation and better notification support for security violations would help improve its Manageability ranking.

This assessment was based on Yellowfin BI Version 7.4. Since our evaluation was completed Yellowfin released version 8. The new release includes Yellowfin Signals, which uses machine learning to provide automated analyses as well as alerts and notifications when values change. It also includes Yellowfin Stories, enhanced collaboration capabilities that significantly advance its capabilities and adaptability to meet broader enterprise needs.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.

Regards,

Ventana Research.