Sisense Reviews

Our company considers itself a next-generation technological company, and its organizational structure and operations are highly automated. Instead of employing a standard monolithic ERP system (e.g., SAP), we have built our IT infrastructure using corporate-environment open-source standards. Automation is approached from a decentralized perspective based on this open-source IT backbone. In other words, our company uses different software packages for different functions and ties them together to form an enterprise collaboration platform. The result is impressive: we enjoy no-compromise IT functionality and flexibility with extremely low software costs. It was into this environment that our company sought to integrate a reporting and analytics tool. Our company’s operational and historical data was consolidated into a homegrown data warehouse, based on a MySQL database. We were looking for a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with its existing system, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive.

Before we implemented Prism, we relied on the technical expertise of a small number of people to create manual queries. Upon request from business users, the queries were run manually using a MySQL client and the results were exported to Excel for delivery.

Before selecting Prism, we evaluated a well-known open source package (with paid premium service and support) and also looked at a Microsoft product.

We wanted a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with our existing systems, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive. After evaluating the alternatives, we concluded that Prism was the only solution to deliver on all of the company’s requirements. Whereas our previous approach required hours for each new report, Prism enabled non-technical personnel to create reports in minutes.

During the trial phase, we set up a test database and tested the software successfully using very cheap PC hardware. After selecting and purchasing Prism, more powerful hardware was used. Setup was very easy.

We use Prism to generate all of our standard operational, managerial and financial reports. As adoption within the company is increasing, more and more managers are creating and customizing their own reports. Technical staff is still available to help, but demands on their time are now a fraction of what they were before.

The biggest benefit of having Prism is that we quickly achieved uniform and comprehensive monitoring and reporting on all key performance indicators. Additionally, management now has very fast and easy access to any information they want, via custom reports, and are able to quickly test "what-if" hypotheses using Prism.

We were looking for a way to easily track and analyze key business metrics, such as revenue channels and customer segments, and to generate detailed operational performance reports. Since the company’s operational data consists of about 20M records in a 100GB MySQL database, the solution had to easily integrate with MySQL and quickly process large amounts of data.

Before using Prism, we used various piecemeal solutions to try achieve the reporting and analytics it needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. Some of our analytics requirements were not being met at all.

Our company explored the possibility of expanding development of its in-house analytics software development, but deemed it too expensive and time-consuming. Our company then evaluated BI solutions from several leading BI software vendors before selecting Prism.

We chose Prism because it had four primary advantages over the competition, which made it an easy choice:

1. The agility of the Prism software to answer current and future questions in a very simple and efficient way

2. The ability of the company’s in-house team to easily create, maintain and modify Prism reports and analytic applications for any future needs without the need for expensive maintenance and support services

3. The rapid analysis of large amounts of data using inexpensive hardware, as demonstrated even before purchasing the software

4. The extremely short implementation time: it took only three hours of planning and ten hours of implementation to be up and running with all the initial reports we wanted

Even before making the decision to purchase Prism, SiSense worked with us to implement a thorough demonstration of Prism running over our actual data. This was accomplished via Web conference only, with Prism running on standard desktop PC hardware. Following the purchase decision, our personnel traveled to SiSense’s offices for ten hours of implementation and training. Overall, it took only three weeks from the initial demo to the live, fully-functional BI solution.

Our management now enjoys the benefits of a comprehensive dashboard which presents live transaction and project data, as well as drill-down views into specific customer, transaction and translation project data. All the managerial and operational reports required by our company are available, and the ability to easily make modifications means that the dashboards and reports are improving all the time to answer new business questions.

The ability of our management to monitor all business processes in realtime allows fast responses to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arise and to prevent small problems from becoming big ones.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

How is customer service and technical support?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

For how long have you used this product?
- 4 years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- It's lightweight, good value, easy to implement and work with, easy to hookup data sources to and create dashboards.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- We're an agency, we used to do our client reporting in excel. With SiSense we can send them automatically generated professional reports. Right now, we use it for the more complex dashboarding projects with several data sources and serve them out through the web.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- In terms of visualization there is still some room for improvement. For our more demanding customers in this field we add a visulization layer.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- The product has become a lot more stable these past years. Currently no issues.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- We have worked with both Qlikview and Tableau and found that for most of our customers the extra money they'd have to pay did not result in more value.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- About 4 years ago, there were a few products in this area in this price range. In terms of functionality nothing came close.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- The company has improved in this a lot as well. Currently no issues at all.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- Remarkably easy. We slam it on a hosted server, use the API connections to get the data in, create other connections where there is no API and we're up and running for a customer within 2 weeks.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- In-house

What is your ROI on this product?
- Cannot say - we can do a lot of projects at a much lower price than our competitors, because of SiSense, so I'd say it's pretty good.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- Cannot say - but it's pretty low

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- We have a lot of customers that are in the process to become more data driven. For the first time they see a lot of data come together and they can prove the power of data to their board without having to do huge investments in hard and software. Then after some years they will have outgrown the product but at that point they will be experienced, will know better what they need and the risk for bad investment is a lot smaller.

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

How was the initial setup?

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Room for Improvement

Customer Service and Technical Support

Other Advice

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Deployment Issues

Customer Service and Technical Support

Initial Setup

Implementation Team

ROI

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

Other Advice

We chose Sisense for a rip-and-replace of Tableau 9.0. After our initial implementation of Tableau, and as our data set grow, we quickly ran into major performance, stability, and usability issues.

We went with Sisense because of its ease-of-use, visualizations built for the web, easy-to-use API, and, most importantly, its performance and ability to handle very large datasets.

Other key features are how Sisense manages multi tenancy and its visualization plugin support. This give sus the ability to support our use case and build our own custom visuals as needed.

We have been very pleased with our experience with Sisense to date. Our sales team is very excited about the slick dashboards we can put together with very quick turnaround times.

Although its plugin support mitigates this, Sisense could use additional out-of-the-box visualizations. Additionally, the maps feature could also be improved.