Yellowfin Offers Free Year of Business Intelligence Through Microsoft Azure

Yellowfin, a business intelligence software developer from Australia, in an effort to expose data analytics to a wider user base, has offered limited free use of its platform through Microsoft's Azure cloud.

The Melbourne-based software developer provides its 10,000 customers around the world the standard business intelligence fare: data visualization, data discovery, dashboards.

"What makes Yellowfin different is we have a really big focus on not only the people who produce analytics, but the people who consume analytics," said John Ryan, the company's director of product marketing.

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That involves those within an organization, including business execs, who typically need a middleman to serve them analytic insights.

"If an organization is really committed to being data-driven, you want to get it into the hands of people who are really nontechnical users," Ryan told CRN. "We are really driven by the belief that data is more valuable when shared."

Yellowfin's analytics platform was built for creating and sharing data insights in a way that goes beyond the traditional scope of business intelligence tools -- that includes social media collaboration and storyboarding features.

The company, founded in 2003, also designed its platform to be cloud-friendly, with a centralized architecture to support completely browser-based access, Ryan said. Users can deploy the platform on-premise, or in multitenant cloud environments.

The Microsoft cloud offer grants organizations that provision Yellowfin from the Azure Marketplace free use for up to three users for a full year, after which point they can upgrade to the paid service if they wish to continue on.

"You can spin up an instance of Azure and just install Yellowfin on it. Really this is about making it faster and easier for them," Ryan told CRN.

Yellowfin has offered a similar free usage plan in the past on Amazon Web Services. By customizing its software for specific clouds, the company gives those providers an SaaS package they can easily offer their customers, Ryan said.

But managing the deployments, on a public cloud or in any other environment, is entirely a job for the company's channel, Ryan said.

"We're really committed to helping our partners become their own SaaS engines. We don't want to compete with them. We offer no cloud platform directly for our customers whatsoever," Ryan told CRN.

Yellowfin has more than 250 partners, most of them making up a reseller channel with deep ownership of the customer that will soon start bringing the free Azure plan to customers, introducing many to the benefits of business intelligence.

The channel also consists of software vendors like Proskrptive and Volpara, both in the health-care space, that embed Yellowfin in their own software tools to better track usage, Ryan said.

PUBLISHED AUG. 19, 2015