It was easy to start a software company 15 years ago. There was a huge transformation from desktop to the cloud and that created an opportunity for any vendor to establish their place at the table offering cloud-based software. But it’s now more difficult to create new products that are significant and compete because we have mega-vendors in the cloud. The days of being able to bring a really significant product to market are over.
Business users haven’t adopted the dashboard wholeheartedly. Some of that is history, some of that is data illiteracy, and some of that is the fault of dashboard platforms themselves - how and who they’re designed for.
One of the challenges with being a fast-growing SaaS vendor is that you're so consumed with running your business that you're unlikely to stop and take a breath. If you’re growing quickly, there can also be a perception that you don’t really need to look at what’s happening in your business. Instead, you may divert resources to building a new product or marketing rather than actually thinking about your business.
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.
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.
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.
Looking forward to 2020, there are five things I think we’ll see happen more. We’ve seen a ton of consolidation this year and we’ll see more next year. There are about 75 front-end vendors in the BI space and the reality is that they can’t all survive in the market as it is today. Salesforce purchased Tableau recently and a lot of smaller vendors have already been bought.
With businesses becoming more data-led, there's now an expectation that you will use numbers when talking about strategy and the state of your business. You can’t do that by just looking at a dashboard because they don’t provide any context to the data. You may see that revenue has gone up but it doesn’t tell you what’s happening in the business or how different parts are performing.
