One of the key pieces of work that we've done this past year is to actually build a completely bespoke application, so that we could properly look at the different ways that we could embed Yellowfin. This has helped us create a really unique customer experience within a third-party application. Like all great stories, our vision fundamentally changed on that journey, and we learned three valuable lessons as we built this application we want to share with you.

Yellowfin have done a lot of work with software vendors over the years, helping them to embed analytics into their applications and we've learned a lot through that process. One of the things we have learnt is that there are some recurring fundamental issues with how product managers bring analytics into their product, an approach which can prevent them from realizing the full potential of their embedded analytics.

These bundled analytics tools help organizations facilitate and increase the adoption of self-service BI practices among regular business users in a specific operational domain, such as finance, marketing and sales. It does so by improving the availability and measurement of important, relevant historical data for your end users’ decision-making.

One particular feature requested by our customers is 3D body mapping, and whether exporting 3D models and utilizing its visualization and filtering can be applied easily. This technical walkthrough shows you how to leverage Yellowfin to integrate 3D models within Yellowfin and then use them to create a fully interactive display in your dashboard.

If you're looking to embed an analytics solution into your software product in 2021, it’s important that you don’t just think about the short-term. Take a long-term perspective and think about these three key criteria to find the best fit solution for your business.

One of the things we've done a lot of work on at Yellowfin is automated business monitoring (ABM), specifically with our product Yellowfin Signals. It can truly transform organizations and help them to deliver insights faster, ones they can react on. ABM has been in the market for about five years but we haven't seen it take off just yet. One reason is that automated business monitoring challenges the status quo of the data analyst.

Once, dashboards and reports were limited to being embedded into our apps as standalone modules - essentially, as separately accessed product features. This limitation sometimes meant analytics is forgotten by users, and more often than not, underutilized in its potential. Today, contextual analytics makes it possible to embed analytics directly into the core workflow of your software.

In the latest release, the Yellowfin team focused on several new enhancements that expand the ability to share Stories and valuable insights more widely, and deliver greater consistency and governance in the user experience when building dashboards and reports. For the full list of updates, read the release notes and check out the video below to see some of these new enhancements in action.

One of the big trends we’ve seen this year is organizations going direct to consumer. Manufacturers who sold through retail outlets are moving online, and as a result a huge amount of digital transformation is occurring. A customer of ours has done exactly that. Kyowa is a Japanese cosmetics and health food company and they’ve moved from retail to online and digital, and Yellowfin has been a significant part of that journey. In particular, they’ve used Signals.

Augmented analytics uses emerging technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language generation (NLG) to automate data manipulation, monitoring and analysis tasks and enhance data literacy. In our previous blog, we covered what augmented analytics actually is and what it really means for modern business intelligence.