Yellowfin, Macquarie Uni win global BI award

Peter Dinham
Friday, 09 December 2011 03:15

IT Industry - Market

Australian-based, international business intelligence vendor Yellowfin and its client, Macquarie University, have received two awards for Location Intelligence (LI) at the sixth annual Ventana Research Leadership Awards.  Yellowfin's Ventana award is the first by an Australian software vendor.

Yellowfin was chosen as the Ventana Research 2011 leadership award winner for LI, while Macquarie University was recognised as the Ventana Research 2011 leadership award leader in LI.

Yellowfin is the first Australia-based software vendor to win a Ventana Research leadership award, and Macquarie University the first Australia-based university to take home a Ventana Research leadership award. Ventana Research is a California-based global benchmark business and IT research and advisory services firm.

The awards recognised the Yellowfin and Macquarie University BI implementation as the best 2010/11 worldwide example of LI and the most likely to produce significant business value heading into 2012.

'The Yellowfin - Macquarie University joint analytics program demonstrates how strategically analysing location-based data can deliver organisations previously unheralded operational insight,' said Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research. 'Yellowfin has helped Macquarie University empower business and academic decision-makers with the information needed to underpin effective resource, infrastructure and strategic planning as well as student acquisition initiatives.'

The 2011 Ventana Research global awards were open to any organisation and vendor that had delivered a BI implementation during 2010/11. The awards recognise individuals and organisations that have advanced business leadership and achieved outstanding business outcomes through the use of technology.

Award submissions, judged by Ventana Research's world-renowned industry research team, were scored according to their use of people, processes, information and technology, the best practices developed and the project's business impacts in 2010/11 as well as the projected value in 2012.

Macquarie University information director, Dr Neil Fraser, said Yellowfin's LI technology was enabling the university to analyse large location-based datasets to uncover questions, answers and opportunities at a micro and macro level. 'We can now accurately map where our students are coming from and develop effective marketing strategies accordingly. For example, we can monitor student intake around the world or traffic flow around the campus. We can even analyse where our funding comes from based on locality - the opportunities are limitless.

'Widespread self-service access to reporting and analytics is vital for our success as a university. Being able to visualise our data is key to discovering these types of problems and opportunities and Yellowfin delivers that.'

Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie, said that the internationally recognised award acknowledged the capacity of Macquarie University's BI implementation to improve the quality of teaching and student services in an era of greater competition.

'Macquarie University is utilising reporting and analytics to create considerable competitive advantage in the Australian and international higher education markets. Being able to identify where current and prospective students are coming from, and how the location of university resources and infrastructure impacts the quality of learning, will continue to deliver Macquarie University significant business value.'

The Yellowfin - Macquarie University implementation also won the People's Choice Award at 2011's inaugural Excellence in Business Intelligence Awards at the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2.0 Conference in October.