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 today, it's a different story.

2019 has been a really terrific year for Yellowfin. The highlight for me was having an ‘aha’ moment where I could see our value proposition and we offer our customers. This year has been a complete step-change in the way we think about our organization.

Recently returned from a trip to the US, Germany, the UK and Japan, in many ways this trip was a trip of firsts for Glen Rabie.

Here are five things that will be shaping the BI and analytics industry in 2020. Keep an eye out for these trends and changes across analytics offerings, the change in how dashboards are used, legacy BI switches, and more.

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. The context you give to data is far more valuable than the data itself, so we’re letting you build data stories when you're working with numbers. This is possible in our next release through Yellowfin Present.

There's a strong perception that numbers will simply drive action but they don't. Look at most dashboards and they’re designed to tell you about your data but they don’t prompt you to do anything with it. That’s the missing piece in dashboard design.

The last 12 months have been tremendous for Yellowfin. We’ve introduced Signals, Stories, a new dashboard build, mobile app and many new improvements to the platform. Over the next 12 months, we’re going to focus on three things that are important to business users - collaboration, automation, and consumption.

Seek, one of our customers, came to us with a laundry list of functionality that their developers wanted. Like many enterprises, they have their own developers who are asked to deliver a design for their UX team and they need and environment where they can do that. They didn’t want us to worry about the UI, they just wanted the ability to code what they wanted directly into the Yellowfin dashboard environment so this was the catalyst for Yellowfin 9, which is our developer platform.

The next Yellowfin release is absolutely huge. We’ve focused on the experience of data consumers within organizations with three new features - code mode for dashboards, Present and our new mobile app.

Not so long ago, our CFO was looking at changing our financial system and it reminded me of a similar situation that happened when I worked at National Australia Bank. We changed our entire ERP because the organization needed to slice and dice their data differently. What they could have done instead was use analytics differently to extend the life of the products they had, so that’s what we’ve done.