One of the reasons why Business Intelligence and Analytics has been slow to take off in organizations is that these solutions are not simple enough for everyone to use. Gartner says that less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations' standard business intelligence (BI) tools use the technology today. Gartner attributes this low adoption to the fact that traditional tools and approaches to BI are often too difficult to use, slow to respond or deliver content of limited relevance.

A company in Australia saw this as an opportunity back in 2003, and is now offering a BI solution with simplified interfaces and informative dashboards, that can even run on tablets. The Australia-based Yellowfin claims that customers of traditional BI solutions such as IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects, are abandoning those solutions in favor of its own BI suite called Yellowfin 6.

According to release notes on its website, Yellowfin was founded "to tackle the problems its founders had experienced with more traditional players in this market." It saw that existing tools "were highly complex, expensive and designed for technical resources --  not business people." Its founders believe that all business users should be able to use BI and analytics tools.

Speaking to InformationWeek Glen Rabie, CEO, Yellowfin said, "The product has been developed recently so you won't find the complexity that you find in Business Objects and Cognos. It's an end-to-end integrated application. So you install one product and it can run your entire BI infrastructure. To do the same in Cognos or Business Objects you need six different products."

Enterprises look for BI solutions that are easy to deploy, maintain, administer and use. Further, the solution should have a good query response rate and easy reporting tools. Yellowfin is offering a lightweight solution with slick user interfaces, drag-and-drop reporting, that "can be deployed within a week," whereas traditional BI solutions take months to deploy.

Enterprises also stress that information captured from various sources should be relevant and well integrated. BI solutions with such features will see faster adoption among all enterprise users. And Gartner even goes so far as to predict the consumerization of BI technology.

"The fact of the matter is that BI is not pervasive and adoption is not in line with the investment made by most firms. Almost every organization could improve, if its stakeholders had easier access to well-integrated information, and if they analyzed that information to manage performance and make decisions," said James Richardson, Research Director at Gartner. "The consumerization of BI technology offers a means for it to break out and reach many more users, by offering faster, more user-friendly and more relevant BI."

Yellowfin claims that with the latest release of its BI solution (Yellowfin 6) even non-technical business users have the ability to perform sophisticated data analysis and report building functions independently.

The new release of Yellowfin includes:

• A new native application for the iPad that delivers a consumer oriented mobile reporting and analytics experience
• An upgraded User Interface (UI) for improved navigation, analysis and independent report building
• Improved content syndication capabilities