Vitality, a company focused on making buildings smart by analyzing IoT data for energy savings and risk mitigation, faced a significant challenge as it grew. The company's original plan involved building basic analytics into its platform. However, as the company expanded, customer demands for analytics quickly outpaced what Vitality could build in-house. The company realized it needed to purchase analytics capabilities to stay relevant to its customers. These capabilities needed to be seamlessly integrated into its proprietary platform, matching the look and feel of its software, and delivering an industry-leading user experience. Additionally, Vitality saw a huge potential for future growth by augmenting its powerful algorithms with industry-leading embedded analytics.

Profusion, a data science and marketing services company, was grappling with the challenge of slow and reactive reporting for its clients. The company wanted to transition its clients from relying on manual, Excel-based reporting to a more proactive, real-time optimization. A specific challenge was presented by a London creative agency, which required Profusion to develop a solution for reporting ticketing data to its client, an international live show production company. The agency had two requirements: an intuitive interface to communicate financial investment and return through different marketing channels, and the ability to query a single customer view of its customer and extract this data for use within its other business tools. The existing process was labor-intensive, with information only available sporadically or on the client’s request.

TLC’s approach to organizing high-quality data for analysis and distribution across the company and to clients was both labor-intensive and extremely time-consuming. Client data wasn’t being retained in any real meaningful fashion with data analysis and reporting was mostly done manually and managed in extremely complex Excel spreadsheets.On top of this, report delivery was done on a monthly basis by email and the sheer size of the spreadsheets was becoming problematic. Their data was triple the size of what any cloud-based system could handle and the need for superior reporting and analysis in a timely fashion to maximize fundraising was imperative.

Interfolio, a software service provider for higher education institutions, faced a significant challenge as its user base and data volume grew. The company needed a modern data strategy that could unify internal data, streamline reporting processes, and be flexible and scalable enough to serve as an embedded solution within the Interfolio platform. The primary challenge was selecting a BI platform and a cloud data platform that could handle multiple data sources, model complexity, and enable straightforward dashboard creation. The company had been using a competing BI vendor and an in-house solution for managing their consumer-based SaaS metrics and reporting, and for managing reporting data for quarterly business reviews. However, as data sets grew exponentially, these solutions were no longer performant or scalable.

MindMax, a company that partners with universities to increase enrollment, particularly among continuing education and adult learners, faced a significant challenge in scaling its customer base. The company's legacy analytics and BI solution required manual extraction of data from disparate sources, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, and Marketing Automation systems. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, making it difficult to create meaningful reports and dashboards that incorporated data from all these different sources. The company's VP of Technology, Brian DiScipio, and Senior Business Analyst, Kiersten Warendorf, recognized the need for a cleaner, faster way to empower their customers with data-driven insights. They knew that the full automation of BI and ETL through the creation of a modern data pipeline and stack was crucial for the company's growth.

As the company grew, Online Commerce Group’s data become so large that, without a new generation Big Data Analytics solution, management couldn’t receive quality reports. The fast growth of the company meant that Data Manager Paul Auen was unable to run reports with large enough data sets to provide any real value to the business end. “Originally, we could do reports manually, but as the data sets got larger, the reports took longer and impacted the transactional database,” Auen recalled. “We were constrained between keeping the servers running or making it available for reports.” Online Commerce Group chose a popular business analytics tool, but it was too complex; Auen’s group was unable to run reports at the speed and frequency needed for the business. Quickly, the team abandoned and turned to Sisense. The company needed a solution that could: 1. Quickly analyze large data sets coming from multiple sources. 2. Provide drag-and-drop modeling and dashboard creation for business users. 3. Automatically generate reports and publish them to the company intranet. 4. Require a minimal capital investment and learning curve for use.

Paylogic 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), Paylogic has built its IT infrastructure using corporate-environment open-source standards. Automation is approached from a decentralized perspective based on this open-source IT backbone. The company uses different software packages for different functions and ties them together to form an enterprise collaboration platform. The result is impressive: Paylogic enjoys no-compromise IT functionality and flexibility with extremely low software costs. It was into this environment that the company sought to integrate a reporting and analytics tool. The company’s operational and historical data was consolidated into a homegrown data warehouse, based on a MySQL database. Paylogic was 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.

When CEO Andrew Vignuzzi joined Magellan Vacations, his priority was to enable everyone at the company to access, manipulate, and draw insights from their data quickly. The company needed a BI solution that could provide real-time feedback for agents on sales closings, destination performance, and other metrics. Additionally, the solution had to be user-friendly enough for non-technical users to create their own reports and drill down into the data. The dashboards needed to be agile and scalable without requiring major infrastructure upgrades. The personalized, phone-based service of Magellan Vacations made it difficult to track standard sales metrics like closing rates, commissions, and bookings by destination automatically. The company had already trialed a leading in-memory technology, but its performance was sub-par, requiring specialist IT resources and consultants to work with the tool's proprietary scripts. This tool did not meet their needs, prompting the search for a better solution.

As an organization with many different projects, departments, and moving parts, Amadip-Esment collects vast amounts of information from various sources, including human resources, financial ERP, operational software at restaurants and printing units, and specific software systems containing sensitive data related to persons with disabilities. The team had been manually collecting data and arranging it in Excel pivot tables, which was labor-intensive and limited in analysis. They needed to increase the efficiency of organizing and managing these data pieces and required a core BI platform for managerial reporting and customized data queries. Above all, they needed a system that could bring all their disparate data together for analysis.

Plastic Jungle’s business success is predicated by its ability to move faster than the competition. When the company brought in a new CFO in 2012, he aimed to deploy a data solution that would match the company culture. Speed, accuracy and agility were the key tenants for the company data approach. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t paint ourselves into corner by taking a traditional approach to data warehousing.” That meant a solution that could grow to massive amounts of data, and allow regular business users to work with data quickly without requiring a huge investment that would leave them beholden to the product.\n\nPlastic Jungle's BI requirements included the ability to:\n• Manage and sustain the entire operations aspect of Plastic Jungle’s data warehouse with little or no operating support from the engineering and IT staff\n• Allow business users to create any ad-hoc reports they required\n• Provide the abstraction layer between the schema and the metrics that the business sought\n• Refresh in close to real-time – a minimum of once per day, and ideally every couple of hours\n• Not incur a significant capital outlay

WeFi’s database team had been manually running SQL queries, but they struggled to generate the reports that gave the management team crucial feedback. WeFi needed to perform advanced analysis on large amounts of data in three categories: the behavior of millions of WeFi users, including retention activity and data acquisition activity; the performance and activity of wireless networks to which its users are connected; and the activity records of active clients. The average table sizes for these categories were more than 5 million rows, 70 million rows, and 500 million rows respectively.

ProMarket required timely and accurate reporting and analysis of key metrics, such as sales, inventory, profit by product category, spoilage, and optimal order quantities for each store. The company was struggling to process very large amounts of data (over 40 million rows) from its centralized database. The data processing, transformation, and analytics were extremely time- and labor-consuming, making it impossible to generate some of the analytics required by management. Business partners of two leading BI vendors demonstrated their solutions to ProMarket and provided implementation proposals. However, ProMarket selected Sisense due to its ability to fully meet their requirements, faster customization of reports and dashboards, impressive data processing speed, and lower total cost of ownership.

The operational data at OHT consists of over 20-million records in a 100GB MySQL database. Lior knew that they were collecting all the information he needed to get insights, but he simply couldn’t get to it. Transaction data was coming in pretty fast and, in order to continue to be an industry leader, he needed a way to get a 360 degree view of his business as fast as possible. Lior had various ad-hoc and separate solutions running to try and achieve the reporting and analytics the company needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. He would often rely on someone from R&D to extract reports or would end up manually doing reporting in Excel, which would take weeks. These efforts were taking significant resources, both human and computer, to try and get the reports that were needed. Many of their analytics requirements were not being met at all, which was leading to a lot of frustration within the company.

Before implementing Sisense, alpharooms.com faced significant challenges in providing detailed and interactive reports and dashboards to various business functions. The existing tools, such as Excel and OLAP cubes, were not effective in building user-friendly dashboards or offering easy drill-down interfaces. Additionally, IT involvement was required for any modifications, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming. Lee Eckersley, Head of Business Analysis, had experience with other BI tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects, but found them too expensive and resource-intensive for the company's needs. The team needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to handle their data analytics and reporting requirements.

Fiverr needed quick insights on growing data. The company wanted to connect data from MySQL with data from Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Analytics to better track user actions on their website and mobile app. As users increased, so did Fiverr’s data needs, making it larger and more complex with millions of rows a day from various sources. Despite using an internal big data system based on Hadoop, the data complexity made it difficult for the team to build reports and dashboards quickly. Fiverr’s senior BI director, Slava Borodovsky, emphasized the need for real-time results due to the dynamic nature of their data. The product department relied heavily on BI to determine their product roadmap, making the need for data more urgent as departments began understanding its impact on their success.

Act-On, a software company, faced a significant challenge in managing data from over a dozen web tools used for various business activities. Each tool provided unique BI analytics, making it difficult to identify a single source of truth. The company needed a solution that could integrate these tools seamlessly and provide real-time, actionable insights to improve customer experience and operational efficiency. The complexity of integration, unknown costs, and the need for a tool that could prompt team action were major concerns.

Trupanion faced challenges in managing and analyzing large volumes of data across multiple departments. The company needed a solution to track real-time performance, optimize marketing opportunities, and build accurate financial reports. Existing in-house solutions were time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies, leading to a need for a robust BI tool that could be easily used by non-technical users and deployed quickly.

GOAL Academy, an online charter school, faced challenges in effectively utilizing data to keep students on track and align staff with key performance indicators (KPIs). The school relied on various data resources like Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, and different servers, which made it difficult to create a consistent format accessible online. The institution needed a modern tool to better visualize and understand the data, and to merge multiple platforms into one place. The goal was to find a web-based tool capable of processing data from different sources to help teachers make quick decisions in the classrooms and improve student retention and graduation rates.

Sonny explains that before Sisense, company resources would be invested in reigning in data and wrestling with the complicated process of aggregating, processing and delivering it to the client. “We would build a bunch of pivot tables in Excel on numerous tabs, and then we would give people an import function that would import the raw data so that they could see the dynamic reports in Excel. But there were a number of problems, for example Excel would limit the amount of rows in a report, or the report was slow, or people just didn’t know how to use it.” Sonny also mentions that another significant problem was the task of distributing the data reports to thousands of different clients. To keep the reports current and updated, clients had to manually re-import the data, and eventually customization requests demanded even more time and resources, per client. “Overall, there just wasn’t control over what was happening. On top of that, if I had to update the report configuration, I had to send out thousands of new Excel files that had all the pivot tables defined in them. And ultimately every customer would need us to modify their pivot tables. It was just a nightmare.”

With its multiple systems, Avatrade has been generating and gathering large amounts of data for years. Former CTO with a strong technical background, Mr. Lee Levenson, currently VP Operations of AvaTrade, took it upon himself to search out a better Business Intelligence solution for his company. “Our goal was to give a single view from different angles to different people that previously had taken three or four windows from different systems, with business analysts having to export reports into CSV or Excel to generate beforehand. We wanted to replace the need to manually mash all the data together,” explained Levenson. This huge quantity of data, spread over multiple platforms, meant that getting any report done was laborious. “R&D was writing queries, and making very simple reports for whoever needed them before. As is typical in any developed solution, when a report had to be changed or a new report had to be done, it went back to the R&D queue. These requests had to be prioritized. At times this was a huge bottleneck for us,” said Levenson. It was very important to the company to find a tool that would be cost effective, and quick and relatively easy to deploy. A key factor in choosing a BI software was that it be almost exclusively driven by the business user: meaning that anyone in the organization could create their own reports or drill down in dashboards without having to keep running to R&D for every question. “What we wanted from a tool,” summarized Levenson, “was the wow factor. We wanted people to look at it and say wow, where has this been all my life?”

In addition to the custom software that Businessolver had developed internally, they were also using several off-the-shelf technologies such as inContact for their service center; Salesforce.com for sales team and Sage for the accounting department. There was no unified method to tie those disparate data sources together and get an overall picture of the customer interaction. Users would get various exported files from various other users and load them up into MS Excel and analyze in a single location. Due to this lack of uniformity to data access, team members were constantly providing different results to the same question. The problem was not the volume of data but rather the disparate sources of it. It was critical to Businessolver to find and acquire a tool that would allow them to connect all their data sources across the enterprise. That way they would be able to have full confidence that their results were accurate no matter who was collecting the information, and that data could drive decision making based on facts and not based on feelings. Sony Sung-Chu is the Director of Applied Data Science at Businessolver and it was his task to find and test potential solutions. With his years working as a Business and IT Analyst, he came at the question from a very technical perspective. Sony also brought in Sara Johnson, the lead BI analyst for Businessolver, whose background is in economics, math and Business Intelligence. Johnson brought in the first data warehouse at Businessolver and was to be tasked as the internal BI expert, responsible for training and maintenance.

Casting Network’s data was being stored but not really seen, leaving the Sales and Business Development departments tracking KPIs manually. As the company started to expand internationally, the need to aggregate different data sets and evaluate the business on a global scale became even greater. Needing to access Google Drive documents, multiple Quickbook files and 35 SQL databases comprising over a billion rows of data, Nitika had her work cut out for her in pulling together a solution that met Glen’s directive.

The company’s marketing, operations, and finance departments all collect large quantities of data. The performance of various marketing channels (social media, television ads, influencer outreach, etc.) would generally be stored in spreadsheets, in addition to operational and financial data. As the business is global and data is coming in multiple formats from a variety of systems, the data was not uniform — it needed to be standardized before analysis. In the beginning, the company was working with a ‘data dump’ — a webpage with the relevant numbers, which could not be filtered or drilled into. As Crowd Media grew, so did their data and number of data sources. Suddenly, they were integrating Redshift DB, MySQL, and connecting to various APIs from Facebook Ads and App Annie in addition to their question/answer database. Ian wanted to generate more detailed reports on a daily basis that could be easily filtered by any user. At first Ian used Excel, but it soon became clear that a more robust system was needed.

Feros Care faced significant challenges with their manual and time-consuming reporting processes. The organization needed to store and compare historical data, present KPIs visually, and manage a variety of datasets from different sources. Their existing methods were error-prone, resource-intensive, and often outdated by the time reports were completed. Additionally, annual reporting requirements placed a heavy burden on senior management. Feros Care sought a Business Intelligence (BI) tool to alleviate these issues, streamline their reporting processes, and enable data-driven decision-making. They evaluated several BI vendors, including Microsoft BI Stack, IBM Cognos, Tableau, and Qlikview, but found that these solutions required extensive customization, consulting, and mature data warehouses, which were not feasible for their needs.

When a food retailer launches a new item, many people are involved in the process: chefs, suppliers, procurement teams, taste testers, marketing, focus groups, legal teams, manufacturers, shipping companies, etc. Moreover, Gap Systems’ clients manage hundreds, even thousands, of product launches a year. That’s a lot of moving parts - including mountains of data that needs to be managed and interpreted to ensure a successful launch. Smartflow was intended to track these disparate items, so you know who is doing what at any particular time. Except, this wasn’t how customers were using the tool in reality. As a result, clients weren’t getting the value or insights they needed. They would say things like, “It seems our legal department is slowing us down, we need to do something about that,” when in fact, they couldn’t really show either way whether legal was the problem. It was all based on instinct or assumption, rather than the hard data they had at their fingertips. Evidently, choice wasn’t working. Customers needed high-end reporting embedded into the product to make Smartflow a success.

Ignite Media processes massive amounts of data, maintaining approximately 3 TB of transaction, demographic, and media performance data. They had been building all their reporting internally using PHP and .Net, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to scale. Writing new reports from scratch to follow a 'hunch' could take weeks, making it impractical to test new ideas. The company had valuable data but lacked the resources to fully leverage it. Mazda Ebrahimi, the VP of Application Development, sought a solution that would allow them to produce results faster and more easily without sacrificing their intellectual property.

Integrous Marketing faced significant challenges in integrating data from multiple disconnected sources such as Adwords, Analytics, email marketing tools, and Salesforce. The process of manually gathering, cleaning, and joining datasets was labor-intensive and prone to errors. Additionally, generating visualizations from the data in Excel was time-consuming and often resulted in outdated and inaccurate information. The company needed a method to automate these steps and provide a better user experience, especially given the limitations in the types of reports and views that some tools provided.

Juwai.com faced significant challenges in managing and processing their multilingual big data. They used multiple data sources in both Roman and Chinese scripts, and their datasets contained billions of rows. Processing such large datasets with Excel and internal scripting was intensely difficult, leading to manual reports generated by IT that were often out of date. The company needed more flexible and timely reporting to keep up with real-time developments. Additionally, manually adding data led to human errors and inconsistencies, which could only be dealt with reactively. The reliance on IT for report generation also placed a heavy burden on the department, further slowing down the process.

Many companies today often have data that is so complex or distributed, it needs a dedicated team of specialists to clean and maintain it, and only then can a BI tool be useful. There’s a lot of work preparing complicated and dirty data, and many businesses need a simple way to prepare data that most BI tools on the market cannot provide. Mike saw that even after implementing a BI solution for customers. There was often such a steep learning curve, the customer would still be unable to build reports and dashboards independently. Mike’s customers typically come to him after they've failed with another BI solution. His company then takes on managing the client's internal data, some of which as been around for 10+ years, and is big, disparate, and dirty. His team would then wrangle the data together into a BI solution for the client. Mike saw that even after implementing a BI solution for customers, it often had such a steep learning curve, the customer would still be unable to build reports and dashboards independently. It was important that his customers could be self-sufficient, so he wanted to standardize on a tool that he knew would be a win for them.

Quentin Villon, a non-technical data analyst at Qualifa, faced significant challenges in managing and utilizing the vast amount of data collected by the company. Internally, he relied on Excel to manually build activity reports, a process that took two hours daily and resulted in a cumbersome 20MB spreadsheet. This method was prone to errors, with broken formulas and other issues, making it a nightmare to manage. The reports were also delayed, going out a day after the activity took place, which meant they could only acknowledge performance rather than influence it. Generating commission reports was even more time-consuming, taking two days each month. Externally, creating campaign insight reports for potential clients was a labor-intensive process that required several days of manual effort. These reports were crucial for client acquisition but were not reusable, adding to the inefficiency.