Business intelligence that's scalable and flexible

mac2 Data is an Australian business intelligence (BI) consultancy and software provider, delivering bespoke cloud-based reporting and analytics solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The company built its hosting environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Yellowfin as the front-end BI platform.

mac2 Data was launched after its founders discovered a gap in the BI marketplace, identifying that the needs of SMEs were not being satisfactorily met by existing BI offerings.

“We noticed many SMEs were reluctant to embrace BI - particularly because of perceived cost and skill demands,” said mac2 Data Director Adam Sharp, explaining that, as a result of this lockout, many SMEs were developing Excel-based reports in an attempt to explore their data.

“The problem with creating individual reports based in Excel, let alone an entire reporting environment, is that it’s a very manual, repetitive and resource-intensive process,” said Sharp. “SMEs very quickly find themselves spending too much time creating unreliable, unappealing and stagnant reports instead of analysing their data for competitive gain. Additionally, they’re not actually using the data available to them effectively - delivering that information in a cohesive format to the right people at the right time - to drive business improvement.

“To fill this gap, our challenge was to offer a BI solution that could deliver lower total cost of ownership, enhanced flexibility, seamless scalability, faster deployment and easier self-service access - all while reducing delays and optimising our clients’ IT resources,” said Sharp.

To make this vision a reality, mac2 Data partnered with Yellowfin. “As a 100% browser-based solution, with no thick client, it’s clear that Yellowfin was built for easy cloud-based deployment,” said Sharp. “Able to be clustered on multiple servers to cater for thousands of concurrent users to enable high availability and load balancing, Yellowfin provides the scalability and flexibility expected of cloud-based BI deployments.”

Sharp also cited Yellowfin’s flexible financial approach to independent software vendor (ISV) partnerships - in conjunction with its single all-inclusive subscription-based licensing model - as crucial.

Yellowfin’s functional richness played a key role. Sharp highlighted Yellowfin’s range of visualisations, highly navigable user interface, device-independent approach to mobile BI and collaborative BI capabilities as providing critical ‘wow factors’ capable of selling mac2 Data’s overall cloud BI package.

mac2 Data has deployed Yellowfin on a cluster of servers using AWS’s EC2 compute platform. The environment is load balanced across the cluster and automatically scales to cater for demand, while maintaining extremely high levels of availability.

As a Yellowfin ISV partner, mac2 Data has been able to deploy Yellowfin within a hosted AWS environment to deliver SMEs a technologically and financially accessible cloud BI solution. Customers are able to start small - both from a functional and pricing perspective - and grow their reporting environment over time to suit their data and business needs.

Because there’s no on-site hardware or software to deploy and manage, and customers only pay for what they use, the financial risk is almost non-existent. Clients simply scale up and down as workload fluctuates, leading to very low total cost of ownership.

mac2 Data is also able to deliver integrated analysis on key metrics, at the request of its clients, on a case-by-case basis. “The key is that you can start with operational reporting and move towards more advanced analysis of your data - all in the one environment,” said Sharp.

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