Sisense Reviews

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.

At my company, theft-related information was available from several unconnected sources, but without a central database or tools to analyze, our company’s management feared they might not be making the most of their data. The team tasked with finding a solution identified three major goals:

1. Since organizing and aggregating data from various locations drained time and ate up the data team’s resources, our business intelligence solution would have to reduce the workload associated with pulling theft data from multiple sources.

2. Far more theft-related data was available than the team really needed, so simplifying the information after it had been aggregated in one place was the next step. Theft-prevention measures were designed around very basic information: what is being stolen, and where is the theft occurring?

3. Theft prevention is a company-wide challenge, not one the data team would try to solve by itself. Because multiple departments in different locations would use theft information at various points, the team needed a solution that could standardize data consolidation, analysis, and distribution.

Fed up with the complexity of multiple channels, wasted resources, and indecipherable reports, our team started looking into business intelligence options that fit our needs and goals. After initial research, four solutions were evaluated for long-term implementation: Tableau, QlikView, MicroStrategy, and SiSense Prism.

Prism offered the Elasticube Manager, which gave our data scientists the ability to compile data from multiple sources quickly and easily--a major advantage over other BI solutions. This eliminated concerns about data structure and made implementation a snap--a handful of our staff were able to set up Prism with minimal support from the corporate technical team.

Since installation, our Assets Protection teams have created standardized reports and dashboards to monitor theft information, reducing reaction time. Thanks to improved data extraction and analysis, theft-related data is housed in a single location, making data manipulation a snap. The team spends less time configuring data and more time using it to reduce theft.

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.