Niche Player: Yellowfin

Australia-based Yellowfin develops a web-based BI and analytics platform. The channel accounts for about 30 percent of the company's revenue with OEMs a key route to market. The company released Yellowfin 7.4 in October with machine-learning capabilities and a new lightweight data preparation toolset.

Strengths: Yellowfin's web-based software offers reporting, interactive visualization, dashboards, threaded discussion scheduling and alerts in a single package. Reference customers cite the software's low licensing costs as a major advantage. Starting last year Yellowfin's software is available in the cloud running on AWS and NTT Communications.

Cautions: Scalability is a concern with Yellowfin deployments in the smaller ranges, according to the Gartner report, and some customers say they have had difficulty handling higher data volumes with the product. The company is also hindered by low market awareness and momentum and ranks low in its understanding of the market due to the product's relatively limited breadth of use by reference customers.