Yellowfin launches new consumer-oriented Android application for Mobile BI

SOURCE: Yellowfin

Global Business Intelligence (BI) vendor, Yellowfin, has launched a new HTML 5 application for Android devices, offering the same feel and functionality as its existing native applications for iPad and iPhone. 

The application is available on Android version 4.1, and like Yellowfin’s other mobile applications, comes as part of a standard Yellowfin license.  This latest application replaces Yellowfin’s original native Android app, released in February 2011.

“The new application brings Yellowfin’s support for Android devices into line with its industry acclaimed and award-winning support for Apple’s iOS platform,” said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie.  “Yellowfin for Android now integrates Yellowfin’s renowned ease-of-use and collaborative capabilities to deliver a Mobile BI application based on the intuitive, interactive and collaborative principles underpinning the world’s foremost social media platforms and applications.”

The application is available for free download from the Android Marketplace and complements Yellowfin’s native applications for iPad and iPhone, released in November 2011 and April 2012 respectively.

Features and functionality

Yellowfin’s new Android application supports device multi-touch interface, and includes all the ease-of-use and interactivity now synonymous with the vendor’s mobile offerings.

A completely restyled User Interface (UI) mirrors Yellowfin’s current apps for iOS, enabling users to view all their dashboard tabs and favorites at a glance, Interact with reports, toggle between chart and table mode with a single swipe.  A dropdown inbox allows users to control all information delivery, access and dissemination from one central location. The new UI also makes knowledge sharing easier, allowing users to comment on, annotate and email reports – to incite action – with a few simple touches.

Users can subscribe to and save ‘favorite’ reports, filter results, drill down and through reports, sort data and set alerts. The new application also embraces Yellowfin’s author once, consumer anywhere approach – any reports created via the browser are immediately ready for mobile distribution.  Customers gain the benefits of Mobile BI immediately.

Enriched analytical capabilities include the ability to apply series selection and section reports.  Series selection allows users to dynamically change the metric or metrics that are being displayed on a chart, enabling easier interpretation of charts that are crowded or have different scales.  Section reports allow users to split-up a report into multiple sections, making it easier to compare categorical information and identify trends.

Yellowfin: Responding to the ‘consumerization’ of BI

Rabie said that the new application would deliver a compelling mobile reporting and analytics experience by embracing the ‘consumerizaiton’ of BI and enterprise IT at large.

“Above all else, we want to offer business people a genuinely enjoyable, collaborative user experience – so the application has been designed with a consumer mentality front-of-mind,” said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie.  “We’ve looked at how people like to use leisure-oriented mobile applications, interact and share content on popular social media platforms, and replicated that experience in a business environment.  As with Yellowfin’s applications for iOS, we wanted to ensure that customers accessing BI from Android-based mobile devices could also engage with their BI content, and each other, in an immersive and enjoyable fashion.”

Yellowfin’s Android app to help boost lackluster BI adoption rates

Industry experts agree that the growing popularity of user-friendly Mobile BI applications may provide an antidote to persistently poor BI user adoption rates.  BI user adoption rates are estimated to sit anywhere between eight and 24 percent of potential users.

Analyst firm Nucleus Research predicated that increased Mobile BI usage during 2013 would see BI adoption rates double worldwide this year.

“It’s been widely suggested that a consumer-oriented approach to BI, combined with mobile delivery, has the potential to significantly boost penetration rates throughout the enterprise,” said Rabie.  “If we can deliver Mobile BI to end-users through an application that they’ll love using, we then have the ability to encourage more people to engage with BI consistently, over a prolonged period of time.”

Specialist Mobile BI analyst, Gartner’s Joao Tapadinhas, recently forecast that Mobile BI users would constitute over 30 percent of the number of overall BI users, worldwide, by 2016.

According to Dresner Advisory Services’ (DAS) 2012 Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, more than half of organizations currently using BI expect over 41 percent of their users to have access to Mobile BI within 36.  Nearly 40 percent of those organizations expect that over 40 percent of all users will access BI exclusively through mobile devices by 2014, the report found.

Yellowfin’s Android application to capitalize on shifting market sentiment

Research from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech has indicated that Android operated smartphones are becoming more popular than Apple’s iPhone.  From mid-November 2012 through mid-February 2013, Android increased its share of US smartphone sales to 51.2%, up from 45 percent.  Conversely, iPhone dropped to second place as its share of US sales fell to 43.5% from 47 percent over the same three-month period.

According to figures coming from IDC in the last quarter of 2012, Android held a 70 percent share of worldwide smartphone sales, compared to Apple’s 21 percent.  IDC reported that tablet shipments for the same period also favored Android (53.8%) over iOS (42.7%).

IDG Connect’s Global tablet ownership report, based on a sample of 3124 business and IT professionals, revealed shifting market sentiment, with 44 percent of respondents stating that they plan to purchase an Android tablet in the future, while just 27 percent said their next tablet purchase would be an iPad.

Yellowfin: An industry leading Mobile BI solution

The release of Yellowfin’s latest mobile application reaffirms the vendor as a first-choice provider of Mobile BI, capping an impressive 18 months in which:

– DAS identified Yellowfin as a leading Mobile BI solution in its latest Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, which ranked and compared the world’s foremost Mobile BI providers

– The Business Applications Research Center’s (BARC) The BI Survey 12 – the world’s largest end-user BI study – identified Yellowfin as a top dashboard vendor in Mobile BI

– Analyst firm Ovum acknowledged Yellowfin as a top Mobile BI vendor “leading the charge with feature-packed yet functional mobile solutions” in its report Solutions Guide: Mobile Business Intelligence

– Yellowfin was recognized in Gartner’s latest Who’s Who in Mobile BI report

Yellowfin offers customers the ability to receive mobile analytics out-of-the-box, on any device or platform, via native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, Web-browser or HTML 5 integration.

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Yellowfin is headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia, offering a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com