Yellowfin's CEO, Glen Rabie, visited South Africa in mid-July to present on the future of business intelligence (BI) in making sense of the rapid changes and increasing complexity in the business environment. His visit followed the appointment of a local distributor, Yellowfin SA, in May, which is gaining significant ground in the region as companies embrace Yellowfin's technology.
The continued emphasis on the BI and analytics market, most recently through the introduction of new big data technologies, has spurred on a demand for analytics tools that simplify the collaborative process of making sense of increasing complex datasets.
Confusion abounds about the future of BI and analytics, but Rabie believes this largely boils down to semantics and definitions, and that the explosion of new data sources in fact offers a solid opportunity to generate new insights.
"The growth and sustainability of small and medium-sized companies relies on quick response to trends and access to powerful analytics capabilities, based on the numerous sources of intelligence they can gather and analyse in order to innovate and adapt. BI's ultimate success rests on its ability to offer a consumer-friendly approach to reporting and analytics.
"I'm convinced that mapping out business strategy through BI remains at the core of a successful business. With steadily increasing requirements from a company's operating environment, simplicity is the path to obtaining value from BI. Traditional BI applications that can only be used by the IT literate means that the intelligence gained can lose meaning between departments, and is thus not useful in decision-making. Sifting through vast realms of data and analysing that which is relevant to a business is at the heart of quick decision-making. It needs to be a collaborative process to factor in the insights of all of a company's strategic departments," says Rabie.
A restriction on collaborative use of BI tools in the past has been their extreme complexity, and while they serve the needs of some organisations, cumbersome traditional BI tools slow down the process and severely restrict the ability to adapt and respond swiftly to opportunities and changes. Traditional tools are costly and require lengthy training, and the outputs are difficult to analyse and define.
Users need an application that keeps up with the pace of burgeoning data. An intuitive interface takes the complexity out of traditional BI tools. Rabie cautions: "There needs to be a balance of simple functionality without compromising on analytical capability. To get this balance right, at Yellowfin, we are extremely responsive to customer demand for new functionality, and concentrate on continually improving the interface and set of dashboard tools to pull datasets together in a meaningful way."
Yellowfin releases a new version of its product in six-month cycles to keep abreast of the increasing complexity in the market. Rabie believes this is largely the reason the company has been so successful worldwide, and has converted many companies in the southern African region in the short term.
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