Sisense Reviews

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Sisense

April 2024

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How are customer service and support?

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Valuable Features:

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Recently, we have added our Google Adword and other Marketing spend in to Prism and have linked this with our bookings, giving a ROI (Return on Investment) at Company Level, Destination, Resort and Hotel Level, so we use Prism to drill down showing the Gross Profit and Cost down to Hotel Level, we also then link in competitor pricing data in to the report also, this by far is the most useful report in the Business so worth some sort of mention.

There is a bit of history to this report, we contracted a Developer who had been working for the company for a while to use the Google Adword API to get to the stage where we can use this data linked with our booking data to automatically adjust bid prices, and also use this to add new campaigns etc, and the dashboard reporting was a big part of the development, we use MongoDB within the business for storing user sessions and some caching stuff as its great for handling big data of that type and is widely used for this purpose within the travel industry, and the developer decided to build the Adword data in to MongoDB from the API and also build the booking data in to MongoDB from the SQL database as this is fairly big data and thought using this technology would allow fast reporting. He built an entire website to handle this process and created reporting on the website, this whole process took about 9 Months and then the contractor decided to leave (for tax purposes as he was coming up to 2 years continually working in the same place), there was then a process for about 4-6 weeks of other developers and the MD (who has a Developer background) trying to get this MongoDB & website to report how we wanted it.

So 11 months down the line I and Prism got involved, I had to come up with a way of getting the Google Adword data into SQL and in the format required with additional information, for speed I downloaded a report from Adwords client reporting with the information required and set up a stored procedure to automatically upload this report, link it to additional data from our databases and create the reporting tables in SQL.

We then put all this data into a Prism Elasticube and I recreated all of the reporting plus a number of the backlog requests outstanding on the old method into the Prism dashboards, It took about a day of effort to do SQL work and about half a day to do all of the Prism work, and due to changes in how we were going to alter bid prices within a couple of days of it going live in Prism we ended up scrapping what was a six figure development, although some one does have to run a couple of reports each day and paste them onto a Server, and kick off a job that runs all the SQL stuff and at the end kicks off the Elasticube build using Prism Shell all from a SQL Server job. This process takes a couple of minutes a day.

This is another demonstration of how you should use the right tool for the right job.

I am COO of an on-line travel agency which advertises and lives on-line but handles all bookings by phone or email. Our data analysis requirements span the usual gamut of online advertising via multiple search engines, direct advertising, call center management, lead conversion and efficiency as well as product and demographic performance analysis. To this end, we had assessed competitive products and IT was already testing a leading in-memory technology – but the that product fit was sub-par and we quickly stopped the trial. The solution required specialist IT resources to work with the tool proprietary scripts and consultants to work with and modify the application for our needs. This was not a cost effective way for our business to invest in BI, nor did it simplify our decision making. We assessed that such a tool might have increased our cost by as much as $80,000 a year, given the need for incremental headcount and hardware.

I set a goal where everyone in the company should be able to work quickly and efficiently with the underlying data and reach effective decisions, so we needed a solution that could address three main requirements:

1. Provide near real-time feedback for agents and managers on any metrics (such as sales closings, destination performance, advertising conversion rates) that would help them better serve our clients;

2. Support dashboard and report-building mechanisms that are simple enough for non-technical users to use while still sophisticated enough to provide the ability to drill down and manipulate the data; and

3. Nimble and scalable enough to not require major infrastructure upgrades or impact the existing infrastructure as reports are generated.

SiSense delivered a solution that met the requirements. Within a few months of purchase, we had what we needed: a near real-time dashboard that didn't bog down the company’s servers no matter how many data sources it accessed, and a solution, intuitive enough to allow non-technical users to create their own reports.

SiSense Prism has helped our IT department reclaim time, provide booking agents with near real-time updates, and allowed sales managers to coach and counsel agents to meet their sales goals. The rest of the company can call up reports immediately and manipulate it on the fly, instead of waiting for IT to publish it. IT now has time to focus on core projects while retaining their role as the data authority and interact with users as resources rather than script writers.

Beyond the operational benefits of the solution, the company data-driven culture is also greatly reinforced: Everyone is much closer to the data. All decision makers, managers and agents can now analyze data and share insights in a snap. The travel industry is highly competitive and the fact that we glean insights in real-time across marketing, sales and operations is a key strength for us.

My team needs to provide information and analysis about numerous aspects of the company’s activity to a wide range of business functions across the company. Examples include detailed Web behaviour analytics, Google Adword spend tracking, email marketing activity tracking, booking pattern analysis for each type of booking and Financial P&L. We require dashboards and reports that include interactive drill-down features so that each user can quickly find information and discover useful insights without requiring the involvement of IT or external consultants.

Before implementing Prism, we were using Excel and an OLAP cube, but this approach didn’t provide an effective way to build nice dashboards or deliver an easy drill-down interface. Also, IT involvement was required to modify the cube every time a new view was required. I have lots of prior BI experience with tools such as Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects, but I felt that these tools were too expensive and resource-intensive for our needs.

I downloaded and installed a number of modern BI tools in order to evaluate them for our purposes. It didn’t take me long to discover that Prism was much easier to use than the other tools. It was easy to get all my data into Prism and I was able to get a first dashboard up and running without reading any instructions at all, just drag and drop. The other tools required much more time, effort and had a steep learning curve. For example, Qlikview’s 1000-page manual scared me off, plus it was clear that implementing it would have required bringing in a consultant and spending more time and resources than we wanted.

We now use Prism to deliver interactive reports and dashboards across alpharooms.com’s various functional units. We run a number of Elasticube datastores, currently handling about tens of millions of rows, until recently on one standard Windows 7 machine with 8GB of RAM. We have recently replaced our Reporting Server with a new server running Windows Server 2012 with 32GB of RAM, with SSD drives and have now moved our main Elasticubes over to this new server on one of the SSD drives. This was not due to any performance issues with Prism, it was just to centralise all business critical reporting.

We use Prism to analyse bookings activity from a number of different angles. One of the most valuable ways we’re using Prism is to discover opportunities for directly approaching hotels for which we have enough bookings – so that we can avoid the extra cost of going through wholesalers. We now have efficient reporting around each type of booking (hotel, flight, car, etc.) in a very easy, fast, do-it-yourself environment.

Other ways we use the software include analysing website usage patterns, optimizing email marketing campaign performance, optimizing purchasing strategies, tracking and analysing our multi-million pound Google Adword spend, tracking call centre performance and conversions by rep and running reports on all customer activity by search keywords, travel destination, common packages and so forth. We also use Prism to analyse our website content to identify missing or incomplete destinations so that the content team can fix them.

I'd say that the greatest benefits of SiSense Prism are usability, rapid time to insight, no need to read a manual or learn a lot, no requirement for outside consulting, low-IT overhead, very fast processing speed and low total cost of ownership.

I love the data hierarchies in Prism – it is extremely easy and flexible to drag and drop any fields you want without worrying about indexes or joins. One of the DBA’s, an expert in Microsoft BI tools and reporting services asked me why we needed a separate tool when we had the Microsoft stuff. I told him about a particular report that I needed and asked him how long it would take to create that with Microsoft’s tools. He said 4-5 days. I told him that I completed it with SiSense in less than two hours.

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?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

For how long have you used this product?
- 6 months

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?

- Agile development of dashboards & reports

- I like SiSense's agility in building the report and analysis. It's report development environment is fast, easy-to-use and sees results instantly. It's easy to build reports with business users together and going through multiple iterations in a short period of time.

- Manage unified data model & data mash-up.

- The ability to define unified data-model universes is imperative to build an enterprise-level BI solution. SiSense's ElastiCube allows us to do just that.

- To crunch large amount of data fast.

- We found that Sisense performs in large volume of data without heavy investment in hardware and IT expertise. The setup was fast and not much tuning was required.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?

- We reduced the report / analysis delivery time from weeks to days.
- The BI team is able to sit with the business user and build reports on-demand, making changes instantly and see the results.

- The business becomes much more agile in analysis, thereby responds faster to changes in the market and products.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?

- Sisense needs to improve the ability to build more complicated reports, such as merging two dimensions of the same type on-demand in one report.

- For example, business's wants to know the user signup-to-usage ratio by country. Both the signup and usage have country dimensions. The two country dimensions are same in attribute type but different in context. SiSense doesn't allow you to join the two countries dimensions on-the-fly in the report.

- Sisense needs to improve its security and permission management capability.

- We find it difficult to define user roles and permission rules to fine-control the data allowed to be access by different business users.

- Sisense needs to improve the capability to distribute analysis / reports via different channels.

- It's hard to implement distribution reports by email.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- Not much.

- SiSense has done a good job to make deployment simple and straight-forward. It's very stable and could handle failures gracefully. We are crunching hundreds of GB's of data without scalability issues.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

- We used the SAP Business Objects SME solution prior to this. BO is powerful but cumbersome. It has many overlapping components doing similar things because the M&A over many years from different solutions that SAP acquired. It's doesn't fit the culture and circumstance of our business well.

- We decided to switch to SiSense after comparing multiple vendor solutions. We favor SiSense for its light investment, quick deployment, agile development and fast response to changes.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?

- Yes, we evaluated:
Tableau, QlikView, Microstrategy, Microsoft Suite, IBM / Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, SAP BusObj, EDGE, Info Builders, LogiXML and JasperSoft.

- We found that SiSense provides a solution that is best in supporting our business to respond to our market challenges.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- 4.5 out of 5

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- It's straightforward.

- It's the simplest setup I have ever had among these BI solutions.

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?
- We implemented the solution In-house.

What is your ROI on this product?
- I don't have the exact numbers now, but I would say it's the best BI investment we had.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- We are under SiSense's annual subscriptions for under $10,000 per year.

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?

- Start small

- Try out the solution in one team or department, for one business domain, and then extend to the whole organization and cross-domain analysis.

- Engage business users

- BI team or analysts could sit with business users and build the reports together. Building reports in SiSense is fast enough for you to do that.

- SiSense is best fit for organizations in a constant-changing market that have large amount of data and constantly explore different ways in analysis.

- Look closely at SiSense's security / permission management capabilities if you have complicated data security and permission requirements. I found it limited and difficult to implement when a complicated scenario arose.

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.