Case Study: Yurbi and Tableau Co-exist; Why You May Need Multiple Solutions for Your BI Needs

Earlier in this decade, the trend of finding a software vendor that can do everything emerged. This is often to the detriment of companies, especially those searching for business intelligence (BI) solutions. We tell people searching for BI that this approach doesn’t really work. No BI solution will handle every use case perfectly, therefore, it’s important to be clear about your specific use cases.

We advise prospects to find a solution or multiple solutions that address your specific use cases. If you do happen to find a solution that can “do everything,” you’re likely overpaying because it’s bloated software.

Customer Case Study

We recently encountered a company with three different use cases for BI that need to be solved with three different solutions. Here is this company’s story:

The company, a large nonprofit in the education space, realized it had multiple use cases for BI. One of the use cases was a need to incorporate dashboards and reports into the company’s customer-facing web app solution. The company also had an internal use case for analytic tools that would enable the company’s analytics team to digest data from multiple sources and drive actionable insights that would benefit both the company and its customers. The company’s final use case was for reporting and dashboards for its business users.

To achieve the first goal of creating client dashboards and reports, the company believed its unique use cases warranted building its own BI tool versus buying one. While building this tool, the company’s development team leveraged D3.js and Angular.js. Building the BI solution made sense because the method in which the company needed to share data was highly specialized, and working with a partner vendor would require the same level of development.

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To meet the second internal dashboard requirement, the company brought in Tableau. After a couple of years with Tableau, the company built numerous management dashboards and dashboards for its power users. The company soon realized that Tableau didn’t meet all of its needs because another use case for non-power users appeared, and Tableau was simply too challenging for the business users at the company. At this point, the company reached out to us and inquired about Yurbi.

Before speaking with us, the company learned that the business users wanted custom report views. While working with Tableau, the Tableau developers tried to meet this need by applying data filters, but soon the dashboards became so overwhelmed with filters that the business users’ adoption slowed because Tableau was too cumbersome to use. When the company discovered Yurbi, Yurbi was immediately a natural fit for this use case.

During our conversations with the company, one buyer told us, “Tableau puts the burden on the Tableau developer to figure out the best way to communicate information to the user, whereas Yurbi flips that model on its head and makes it easy for the user to get the information they like without the involvement of a developer.”

When working with us, the company saw that though solutions like Tableau market themselves to business users, these solutions are still developer tools. Yurbi was designed with the business user in mind, versus the developer, which worked perfectly for the company’s business user stakeholders that needed custom dashboards and reports.

The Bottom Line

Our position is not necessarily to come in and replace a company’s complete BI solution. Our philosophy is to be the right tool in the tool kit. In the above customer example, Tableau was a great fit for certain audiences within the company and its custom-built solution was perfect for its specialized, customer-facing reporting needs. However, there was still a pain point and need for BI within the organization for its non-developer business users, which was solved with Yurbi.

The key to incorporating multiple software solutions to solve different use cases is to set a budget for each software solution. In our customer’s situation, it wouldn’t have made sense to bring in Yurbi if it was an expensive solution because the use case was relatively small. Yurbi’s scalable pricing model designed to affordably fit from the smallest to the largest environment was the perfect fit.

The benefit to bringing in multiple solutions is that as each solution fills its unique requirements, more requirements often arise that can be addressed with tools a company already has. With this approach, companies can bring the right tool in, start small, and allow each technology to prove itself. In the case of many of our customers, Yurbi often fills multiple needs and our customers require more licenses during the organic growth of Yurbi’s footprint within the organization.

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