On the Beach with Yellowfin

Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 1^st June 2014

So it was about time we had a holiday, we had not been away for over a year and both myself and the wife had been working really hard on IT projects for our businesses.

My project needed something else, something that would gather everything together but I was not sure what and I needed time to think, time to go over how this would work when we delivered it to the board, the management and our users.

So this morning I’m off down the travel agent to see what they have available.

Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 1^st June 2014

My dev guys have been working for a couple of weeks now trying to bring together as much social media information as possible. We are attempting to connect twitter, facebook, web page hits, linked in; basically as much as information we can get to form a profile of our customer … those who follow us and those who talk about us here at DSCallards.

This is not wasted time as we have a customer who is looking for this requirement and we wanted to understand the complexities. As we moved from one social network to another it was good to see that they were all using oAuth as a standard interface … a little hassle with facebook but the information started streaming in.

Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 1^st June 2014

Well that was lucky … we had always fancied Mauritius, and the local agent had a last minute deal, better than I could find on the web so we are booked for next week. The photo of the resort accommodation looks breath taking.

The wife is over the moon, decided to travel light … we needed very little. I checked with the resort and they have free public wifi, so the only technology I am taking is my tablet … perhaps if I can clear my mind of all the other project work going on I can investigate how we are going to eventually present this information to the board, the management and the users.

Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 6^th June 2014

It’s taken a week to collate this information, and eventually had to use an open source database that holds the information in document objects rather than the normal row/column format of standard server based databases. This was because each social source had a totally different structure and needed storing and indexing in a specific form.

Once stored, we watched the data updating real-time by the web services our amazing development team had built. We then needed to find relationships between these sets of data.

Page hits, location data, date and time, locales, related word searches within twitter … all this information was initially confusing. But within a day I had our BI team finding relationships … and things started to make sense. They have such a set of skills, just like the development team … you ask for it and it just starts to happen!

I decided to use Yellowfin … we are the UK partner for Yellowfin and I knew we could get to the information quickly once the development and BI teams had done their work. This stuff is so easy to use and so powerful.

Having been down to Melbourne recently talking over the new features in Yellowfin … I knew this would not take long.

Tom Clifford – IT Manager: 7^th June 2014

Well we made it. The flight was not too bad and once we landed we needed to be shuttled across to the resort on the island. It feels like the rest of the world is a million miles away.

The beach is stunning … we went in snorkelling this morning and the water is so clear you could see forever.

So the wife has gone off to be pampered with a massage and some beauty treatment this afternoon. About time I had some time to myself to see if I can find a solution to the data retrieval within this BI project.

Let’s get the tablet out whilst I’m on the beach and see what there is?

BI tools and dashboards, that’s what we need something that looks good to the users and can help management see things out of the data that you cannot normally track.

Hey, this looks good … Yellowfin. Let’s download some of these white papers. Gartner have some great feedback, they are in the quadrant which is important to get buy in from the business. It looks like these guys are learning from others and getting it right.

Nice website, looks like DSCallards are the guys I need to call when I get back. Have tweeted my guys back in the UK to check this out but while I have some peace and quiet, let me go through the website …

Ray Kemp – Technical Director at DSCallards: 7^th June 2014

Ok, the data has started streaming in now and Yellowfin is working really well. The data views were easy to put together. So let’s see who is checking out our website and tweeting our details around the same time.

“Hey guys … come and look at this. There is somebody in Mauritius with a tablet browsing our website and he is tweeting about Yellowfin. He’s got to be on the beach!”

Note: These are actual stats taken at 12:25am on 7^th June 2014. Thanks to Yellowfin and our stunning development and BI teams here at DSCallards ... I know nothing is impossible.

Written by:  Ray Kemp, Technical Director, DSCallards