Presentations. Slide decks. Do these words elicit yawns? Even if they do, we all know that presentations are central in the business world for keeping people up to date and informed of organizational progress and changes. One of the frequently used presentation formats is the end of month/quarterly update that is full of numbers and charts. But putting data in your presentations presents some issues.

This year has been a really terrific one for Yellowfin. The highlight for me was having an ‘aha’ moment where I could really understand our value proposition and see what we offer our customers. This may sound odd, but I think we’ve made a complete step-change in the way we think about our organization this year.

We often come across people talking about managing their data by one means such as a Data Lake, MDM or data governance. Modern data management is not only about managing your data but also about making data useful for the business. Furthermore, data management is also about providing the ability to relate frequently used business terminologies to data in the systems. Most of the big enterprises spend months to discover and identify the impact of any change on their entire data supply chain.

Having analytics built into consumer apps and business software applications is becoming standard practice, particularly as a result of digital start-ups. Start-ups founded on analytics have been shaking up every industry like finance has been disrupted by Monzo's data focus, Netflix’s analytics has upended film entertainment, and Swyfft has used data to change the game for US home insurance. Users have come to expect analytics in their applications.

Dashboards have dominated the BI and analytics scene for over 30 years and have been the core requirement in any analytics solution. They have become the default for presenting data to business users to help them monitor and understand their business better. Their goal was to empower the business by providing them with self-service analytics.

Software Testing has changed a lot! Earlier, manual testing ruled the world of testing, however, test automation increasingly became a reality in most organizations developing software. Testing continued to evolve, and it took advantage of technology innovations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such technology that has made a substantial contribution to automation in general. But, can AI-driven test automation significantly enhance test automation?

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.