David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on Yellowfin drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the 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 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 pro­vides 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.

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 which provides enhanced collaboration capabilities. 

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about Yellowfin and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director