Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor, Yellowfin, has launched an integrated and virtualised Data Preparation Module for analytics.

Data preparation describes the process of transforming data into consistent formats that are suitable for exploration, analysis and report building. Yellowfin's new Data Preparation Module was launched alongside the latest version of its BI platform, Yellowfin 7.3.

The Data Preparation Module will be included as part of a standard Yellowfin license at no additional cost.

"With this release, Yellowfin has delivered another first for the BI and analytics software industry," said Yellowfin Co-founder and CEO, Glen Rabie.

"Yellowfin's Data Preparation Module truly supports the needs of data analysts, enterprise IT and business users. Data analysts can independently prepare data for analysis in less time, IT can easily govern that data, and business users have fast access to data they can trust in order to make critical business decisions."

Yellowfin's Data Preparation Module has been designed to overcome common challenges encountered when preparing data for analytics in three ways, by:

-- Integrating data preparation processes directly into a single analytics environment

-- Offering comprehensive data profiling capabilities

-- Providing automated best practice metadata modeling functionality

Rabie said the problem with traditional data preparation was that it forced organizations to undertake data migration processes, which put data governance and security at risk.

"Moving data from one environment to another increases the risk of unauthorized data access," said Rabie. "A virtualized approach means data analysts can directly connect to, prepare and analyse data sources in one place.

"Delivering virtualized data preparation will empower Yellowfin's clients to maintain unparalleled governance, consistency and security across of all data and analytics content. Any data preparation actions performed will be uniformly reflected across all content -- from reports and charts, to dashboards and Storyboards."

Yellowfin 7.3

The latest version of Yellowfin's BI platform, Yellowfin 7.3 is now available.

Yellowfin 7.3 contained significant enhancements to Yellowfin's advanced data visualisation capabilities, including the introduction of Set Analysis, and a new Content Creation Canvas. Yellowfin 7.3 also included a new range of API connectors with pre-built dashboards for third-party Web applications.

New API connectors delivered as part of Yellowfin 7.3 include Salesforce, Zendesk, Xero, Facebook, Expensify, MailChimp, XE (Standard & Medium Edition), Ring Central, SurveyMonkey and World Weather Online. New and improved versions of Yellowfin's Twitter and Google Analytics connectors were also launched.

More information on Yellowfin's Data Preparation Module is available HERE