Israeli business intelligence company Sisense has announced that it will hire 150 new employees: half in its Ramat Gan offices and half in the US. The company, which currently has 400 employees, serves 1,000 customers, including General Electric, Nasdaq, Royal Philips, and Airbus.
Sisense CEO Amir Orad, who was appointed to his position in February 2015 and works from the company's New York office, says that Sisense has grown several times over in the past three years, with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. The company has raised $94 million since it was founded in 2010.
Simultaneously with the announcement about hiring new employees, Sisense also announced the release of a new version of its software. Orad, a cofounder of Cyota together with Minister of Education Nafatali Bennett, was CEO of NICE Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: NICE; TASE: NICE) subsidiary Actimize before assuming his current position.
The basic idea behind Sisense's products is to enable organizations to observe and analyze large quantities of complex information without huge technological projects. Orad explains that what is new about the revised version of his company's software is the application of machine learning to the information sources and the creation of more advanced visualization.
"If you have three information sources dealing with inventory, the system will know by itself to color them all green and put one next to the other on the screen, so that you'll can look at the connection between them. It's the same with information about your customers' satisfaction. The reason why this is so important is that the quantity of information that organizations possess is growing at an astronomical rate, and no one can keep track of it. If you development IT systems, you will see hundreds of boring tables on the screen with a lot of threads between them. It's a big mess, and no one understands what is going on there. We bring order into confusion, and when you bring order, results can be presented."
"Globes": What is the difference between this and what you have done up until now?
Orad: "The big difference is that now we can give you insights about the databases themselves. Databases are by nature very different from each other physically. They are on the cloud and on the Internet, they are in Excel and in Saleforce, and they are naturally very widely dispersed. Up until now, the IT concern had to physically connect the information sources to each other - something that DBA people did - and only then was it possible to research the data. Our new technology is able to ignore the physical structure, which makes no difference, and no DBA is needed, and separate it from the logical structure that we create. We tell you, 'You're sitting here on a goldmine of information, customers, about the business, the market, you should look at it, and more.' The world today is moving more quickly and making competitive distinctions, and the business people are expected to make decisions without depending on technology, and without waiting a year for some IT concern."
Is the competition strong in business intelligence?
"There are innumerable technologies dealing in big data analytics, but 99% of them fit into two very distinct categories. The first, given simple information, has amazing technologies for businesspeople. Think about Excel on steroids. There are many such technologies that make it possible to analyze simple information. On the other hand, if the information is complex, the IT people have amazing technologies for analyzing it, but there are almost no solutions able to combine these two possibilities, take complex information, and give it to businesspeople without IT in the middle. Sisense is located on that border."
What type of information comes out of the IT systems that was previously inaccessible?
"Royal Philips, for example, installed Sisense's system in all of its MRI products. We gather information on one side from the machine itself - maintenance, radiation level, and on the other side information about the customers, the patients who use the machine, the frequency of events, and the money that the hospital gets. We take it all together, mix it, and give information to the hospital manager, so that he will know how to manage better and get more value from the machine: when to turn it off, when to invest in technicians, and which patients will come first.
"Another example is a non-profit organization for organ donations, which installed Sisense in order to encourage donations. The amazing number is 224% growth in retina donations. Why? Because they analyzed who agrees to donate organs, what the demographics are, what motivates them, which patients need this - and they managed to connect all of the groups and get them to communicate better, and boosted life-saving activity many times over."
How long did it take to install your system in this organization?
"Several weeks. The physical connection itself is not the problem, the transfer of bits from one place to another. The problem is that after you connect it you discover that the bits speak different languages, in different colors, and in different models of information arrangement. This is where people usually get stuck, and spend most of their energy, and that's what we solve."
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on February 8, 2018
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