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linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don't forget to thank them for their continued support of this show. Your host is Tobias Macy. And today, I'm interviewing Amir Orad about Sisense, a platform focused on providing intelligent analytics everywhere. So, Amir, can you start by introducing yourself? Thanks for having me, Amir Ohrad, Sisense chief exec.
And do you remember how you first got started working in data?
Unknown: I've been doing this for more than 20 years. I feel old when I say that.
But my previous 2 startups, both enriched critical mass,
1 was using
data and real time risk engines
to make cybersecurity
decisions.
And, actually,
every time you log in to your bank account or Facebook and you get this text message with a code to put in, That's actually my invention. My name is on the patent still. We're using
for the first time real time data analytics to make decisions. Do we send you that text message or not? That was 7 years of my life. And then I ran a company
doing
financial crime detection using big data to find patterns in banking activities to
catch money laundering and cyber hacking and insider trading and human trafficking only by looking at data
and catching the bad guys. And that was 8 years of my life literally
going through every second financial transaction on the planet.
So that's 15 years of my life. Before that, I was a developer
also building big data systems.
So you can see the pattern here.
8 years ago, I met the Sisense team. I wasn't the founder, but I joined early on as the CEO
and fell in love because they built a platform.
I realized
I had to do it myself in my previous companies all from scratch, like,
literally button up. And I saw a platform that with the right APIs can actually help other companies,
other entrepreneurs
leverage data better.
Fell in love, and 8 years, I'm still here.
Unknown: And so in terms of the Sisense platform, can you describe a bit about what it is and as much of the story behind it as your privy 2?
Unknown: Yeah. Definitely.
So we are in the BI space or the analytics space.
And in theory, it's a valve space with many names like Power BI and Tableau, etcetera.
However,
we're the only company out there that is doing
and focusing only on 1 thing, embedding
analytics via APIs, embedding analytics
into other people applications,
internal applications, external applications mostly,
etcetera.
And we found that when we started,
it was a small niche, but now more and more companies, about 2, 000 today,
already leverage us because
we believe that every
application on the planet will become data driven with analytics built in,
visual analytics,
and service the users with analytics
or become obsolete.
And in the past, you used to have a operational system,
can be in a bank or in a pizza shop or in a telco. It doesn't matter. And next to it, like side by side, you would have your analytical tool.
Business objects back in the day and SAP and
Oracle, and then it evolves to Tableau and Power BI
and Luca. Those were separate systems.
And what we saw is when you have separate environments, you have much less adoption.
You look at things out of context
and it is not aligned with the future, which is all API based, cloud based, modern datasets, etcetera.
So that's how it started.
And we built the company API first, bottom up, while most analytics tools are built for a business analyst first.
So we optimize for the integration.
Other people optimize for the analysts.
And still we have to service
the end users who are not analytical experts.
They are doctors and nurses and truck drivers and, you know,
teachers, etcetera,
that are using those applications we are part of. So that's how we evolved. I'll give you 2 basic examples just to make it, you know, tangible.
We are part of nasdaq.com.
And when a CFO of a public company wants to analyze who's trading their stock, they they go to nasdaq.com/insights,
and that entire Insights experience is running on Sisense. So we bring the data from the Nasdaq datasets,
massage it, run the analytical queries,
put visualizations on top, all API integrated into
the nasdaq.com
application,
and a CFO can consume that as part of their Nasdaq relationship and not as a separate tool. You don't have to download the data to a CSV file, take it elsewhere, and use it. That's just a small example
and maybe a totally different example, but 1 I love because it saves lives.
For anyone who's been in San Francisco lately, if you go on the Golden Gate Bridge literally, as you get on the bridge, there's a big sign that says,
if you have suicidal thoughts, call this number, 1800
text line.
And
they take your call and help you
literally get off the ledge, I guess, and not have those bad thoughts.
When they are on the phone with you
behind the scenes with a machine learning system that using Sisense to recommend to the agent
what's the best thing to say given time of day, weather, demographics, historical
behavior, etcetera,
it's part of the experience. It's not a separate tool that after the fact 1 day will give you a report.
It's
contextual to that experience.
So 2 very different examples, both embedded to an application
that service the users of that application, in this case, external applications.
But may hopefully gives you a feeling to what we do.
Unknown: So in terms of the,
I guess, use cases
and
audience types that you're focused on, I'm wondering if there are
any
kind of broad
categorizations
or generalizations that you can make, or if it's just a matter of you kind of build the platform and everybody who comes to it comes to it for their own reasons?
Unknown: It's an excellent question. We do see some verticals
more than others, mainly the data rich verticals
in healthcare,
financial services,
tech companies, obviously logistics
and supply chain companies,
but we also have the United Nations and other the Red Cross's customers that suits really
wide. But there's something common
to each and every example,
and that is
the entity we work with
sits on very interesting datasets
in 1 location or many,
and the data team or the product team or the engineering team
wants to leverage that data and create insights
inside their end user facing application.
And that's always a pattern. So we work with the data team, data engineers, data scientists, etcetera,
product people, which are the technical people and the product people that build the application,
and then the business people
that want to service their audience internal or external.
That pattern is identical
if you're
a supply chain company,
if you
are, NASDAQ, or if you are Philips Medical Devices, another example. It's the exact same
set of people we work with and the exact same outcome we want to achieve. You mentioned that the, I guess, broad category
Unknown: that people put you into is that of business intelligence,
and that's a category that has been seeing a lot of
I don't know if identity crisis is the right term, but I've been seeing a lot of kind of change and evolution from what people traditionally think of as business intelligence that, you know, as it existed in the nineties early 2000.
And I'm wondering what you see as the
current working definition of what business intelligence is or should be and some of the
market shifts and motivating factors for the evolution from where that term originated to where we are today.
Unknown: You know, back in the day, when I was younger, there used to be Internet companies. Maybe you recall the day where Internet companies and companies and non Internet companies,
and that's not the case anymore. There's Internet companies and dead companies. Everyone are Internet companies.
Everyone leverage the Internet.
I think
BI as a category would almost
will become analytics, but business intelligence will be in everything. So everything will be leveraging business intelligence because
when you watch Netflix, there's business intelligence telling you which next movie to watch.
Right? So those technologies are appearing everywhere.
So that's the broad category as it was defined in the past. I think what it's becoming
is now
a set of analytical
engines
that leveraging modern cloud and API technologies can be
integrated into and inserted into
every application out there as more
fundamental
pipes, if you like, or infrastructure.
And
that is where it's heading.
Gartner has a new term called composable analytics
and composable applications.
What I mean by that is
future applications will be composed of many little ingredients.
Some of those ingredients will be the pipes, the data pipes.
Some will be the databases.
Some will be the data analytics.
Some will be the visualization.
So you're moving from a BI kind of monolith
to best in class components you can
build applications from, and that's where we play.
And I know Gartner actually said publicly they were debating, do they do embedded analytics as a category?
But they said everything 1 day will need those skills,
so it's not time to separate independent category.
So that's a long answer to say,
I think, a, all companies will become data driven
or obsolete,
and, b, business intelligence will become
analytical components you integrate into other applications versus
separate stand alone on the side tools that only a few selected people can use.
Unknown: Another interesting aspect of the kind of business intelligence
category is that it's intended to be directed towards
end users, people who don't necessarily identify as technical.
And so the kind of way that it was generally
approached or manifested is as this self-service interface to the broader data ecosystem where it's kind of, here is your playground where it's safe for you to do things and ask questions,
but if you wanna do anything more complex, then you're gonna have to ask somebody else for help. And I'm wondering what you see as the
kind of table stakes for self-service access to
organizational data
and the ways that business intelligence
needs to be kind of adapted or evolved to be able to fit that requirement?
Unknown: Yeah. It's an excellent question.
I think there was a lot of progress, but also a lot of hype
around this democratization
of business intelligence.
We did move
while a decade ago, 15 years ago, IT was
owning the data and and you have to be an IT person to really understand what to do with it. We did make a big jump forward and Tableau gets the credit early on to enable and democratize business analysts
with data. So we moved from IT only to IT and business people and business analysts.
However,
we are almost at the end of 2022, early 2023,
and still 80%
of the people in organizations
don't use BI
because
it's built for business analysts.
And most people in the company
are factory workers
and
doctors and nurses
and logistics managers and HR people
and marketing people and all of those things. And we're not 1 thing. We're not BI experts. We don't want to be. We don't care about BI. We just want answers.
And
that's what I feel
is
propelling companies like Sisense, which I didn't mention. But for context, we're not a startup anymore. We have, you know, over a 100, 000, 000 business
in size
and thousands of clients
because to address the 80%, they don't want tools for BI people.
They want tools for people,
human beings, nothing about technology.
And that's the unserved part of the market.
And that
promise
has not been met yet. We democratized only for the BI experts.
And that's why you get
natural language technologies, augmented analytics, AI, and embedded, what I'm talking about, all coming to play to enable those people that are not experts.
Unknown: As far as the
kind of self-service data doc democratization,
what are some of the, I guess,
organizational or infrastructure challenges that teams are having to struggle with or some of the technical, either capabilities or investments that need to be
grown or established to be able to support that kind of organization wide capability?
Unknown: There are 2 approaches today that are common,
which are the old way of doing things, but the current 1 is
there is
a central BI team or departmental BI team who builds on behalf of the human beings dashboards.
For example, if I'm a teacher
and I want to know how my students are doing,
I have to go to a separate application,
log in,
and hope that my BI expert in the
school
built in advance an answer to my question.
That's
like approach number 1.
If it's the company is less advanced, it will be a central big dashboard with many, many things for all employees in the company.
Small advance would be someone in the teacher's area that builds the dashboard.
Option number 2
is that
I will be offered access to tools
that
if I'm really savvy, will allow me to ask a question on the fly
using some drag and drop
dimensions and data and time horizon and, you know, hopefully understand correlations and regressions and can connect the things together and find out how my students are doing.
And those are the 2 current main approaches.
Then we believe with the 3rd approach, which is as a teacher,
when I use my day to day teaching application where I give homework and grades and everything,
there'll be another
indicator next to every student name with a red flag, yellow flag, green flag saying how they're doing.
And I'll get an alert practically without asking any questions saying,
did you know that you have 2 students who suddenly dropped in their performance? You should take a look.
That's I believe the future of analytics may come to
you. They are in the tools you already use. They're not some separate thing,
and they are natural
to the context you're in. And I believe that's the next level as an industry should
push towards
because I'm more likely to use it as a teacher.
And my student is more likely to be saved from dropping out of school if I get this alert and this flag
versus me chasing some dashboard somewhere.
Unknown: To that point of
the kind of level of understanding
required for that second approach of here are all the tools. Good luck. Go ahead and figure it out. That can potentially lead to the issue of, I found an answer, and I'm happy with the answer, but it's actually the wrong 1.
And I'm wondering what are some of the ways that as tool builders, as, you know, companies providing platforms,
how can we work towards
adding some useful guardrails
and improving that user experience of, okay, you want to be able to get to this answer.
We're going to help you understand
the different kind of joins or the different ways to explore the data that is accurate and actually provides a safe and reliable answer.
And, you know or even just to the point of helping people understand, like, what are some of the viable answers or being able to work at the level of their understanding of saying, like, this is the thing that I want to do. Like, I want to understand how my students are doing in terms of their grades. And then saying, okay. Here are all the different tables that you need to work across. Here are some different ways that you can join them.
Unknown: So I think what you just said, part of the question is part of the answer and the problem.
A teacher that wants to know how the student is doing should not know a thing about
joins and tables
and views and indexes. Nothing. You shouldn't know it exists.
You should ask a question and get an answer.
Unfortunately,
technology in the past limited us to forcing to know
those concepts,
fact tables and dimensions, etcetera.
But in an ideal universe and the technology is making progress in that direction,
they can ask a question in natural English
and just get an answer.
Or even better,
not ask a question, but be told the answer already.
When you watch a movie on Netflix and us as consumers, I believe, is better analytics than us
as professionals.
You don't ask Netflix what's next movie I should watch. It just tells you. And if you finish an episode, you don't ask Netflix what's the next episode. It just offers it to you. And when I log into Amazon,
I don't tell them it's my kid's birthday. They tell me, we saw you bought a lot of stuff for a party. Maybe you want this thing for the party.
They answer the question before we ask
them. Those are simple examples,
and I would claim that an HR person
that has done a merit cycle,
the AI can guess if they want to know what's the distribution of merit and performance against merit and so on. And for patterns across many organizations, you can match.
So I believe
that
the answer is not teaching all of those things
because with great powers come great responsibilities
and we may get wrong answers and confuse people too often. But to build technology and tools that
shortcut this process and never give answers proactively,
or let them ask them in English with the intent
and then do all the leg work behind the scenes. And the technology is very close
to being there already, if not there already.
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In terms of the
end user experience, what do you see as the role of the,
you know, current batch of low code and no code tools as a way to be able to make that interface
more accessible and comprehensible to somebody who doesn't have an extensive background in analytics?
Unknown: That's an excellent point. That's really the bridge between the 2 realities we discussed. Right? So 1 reality,
the teacher just wants an answer if he know nothing or joins.
The other reality, a BI expert is building that
query and dashboard for them. Local applications are creating a bridge between the 2,
and they are necessary
evil between
current reality and the future
technology
that I think will really progress and advance the market.
Not just in analytics, in general, in application development.
There's not enough developers to build all the applications you want. So I expect to see more and more low code applications
include
basic analytical capabilities built in,
simplified using the same low code concepts you use for other
use cases.
I can tell you we
built in Sisense, for example.
We asked ourselves, how can you join tables
by a local person?
And we literally drag and drop 2 tables, connect them together, and and the computer guesses
left join, right join, and the many to many complexities that's come with it
as a way
to bridge this reality from an expert to someone who know nothing.
So I expect it to be a bridge. I think it's a good development in the industry. I think it can
help democratize access to insights more.
And
like always, I think it will 1 day not be needed because the AI will just build you the application of the dashboards
completely,
and you can skip that phase a few more years before we get
Unknown: there. In terms of the Sisense platform itself,
what are some of the unique
capabilities or unique usage patterns that you target as far as this space of
business intelligence, ubiquitous analytics, and being able to
make those analytical capabilities
more accessible to people who don't want to dedicate their time learning about, you know, what's the difference between the left, right, or inner join?
Unknown: So the 2 extreme areas we have invested in over a decade of innovation and research.
Number 1 is developers
and making it API first. So we have endless technology
that allows that is all built above APIs,
allows to integrate and embed Sisense into other people applications and products
from, you know, GitLab integrated into their environment
all the way to the ability to integrate Sisense inside Excel
and PowerPoint, believe it or not, the output of Sisense Sisense.
So that's developer tools from multi tenant technology to CD capabilities,
from data APIs to security APIs,
from query optimizations,
what have
you. Because if you want to integrate analytics into sound application,
that's a very complex area to do well.
We found other tools in the market are doing that as a hobby, as a sideshow. It's not the main thing. And on the flip side,
making it extremely easy to use
because in a weird way, our users are less end users, not the BI admin or developer,
but the end users are less
of an expert
less of ex being an expert in BI than typical users because they're the doctors and nurses and truck drivers and marketing people and the salespeople, etcetera.
So we build technology that actually allows to
look at 2 tables without having to understand joins, and natural language
query, where you ask a question in English, and generation when you look at the dataset or
the pie chart and it tells you in English what it means.
Predictive power. So for example, if you're not an expert
in data,
what we do is we take any time serious data and just predict the future
without any action required by the user visually.
And what we do behind the scenes, we need to have numerous over a dozen machine learning algorithms. We try
on the data,
AB test it, find the highest likelihood of success based on the future data, and pick that 1 and recommend it. So extreme ease of use on 1 end,
using AI, predictive power, etcetera,
and extreme API focus on the other end, which are 2 very different disciplines.
And do all of that natively to cloud leveraging,
you know, if you run on My Cloud, your Cloud, on GCP, on Azure, on Snowflake, on Redshift, on BigQuery,
but also on CSV files, Hadoop,
and, Oracle servers. So that
breadth of integration points
is really important because in real life,
people want to believe they have 1 data warehouse that does everything, but usually the data is spread
among different locations and different people, unfortunately.
Unknown: And as far as the implementation
of the Sisense platform,
what are some of the design
and architectural aspects that you've leaned on to be able to power these use cases and be able to support this
kind of ubiquitous integration across different downstream use cases and as well as working with some of the upstream data sources.
Unknown: So first, you mentioned the integration and architecture.
It's really thinking in advance about the integration points
and the architecture.
Most analytical tool either
run on a high performance database
or
require you to ETL and
build pipes to do it
via third party tool.
And we found that to accelerate adoption,
we have to support both. So we have our own in memory engine for data acceleration if it's not sitting on a Snowflake
type technology,
or you can build the pipes to Snowflake. If you have 1, it will sit on top and run queries on top. When I say Snowflake, I mean, all of those
that layoff technologies. That's number 1.
We integrate to your CICD tools, your git repository.
We allow you to run Python models on Sisense
to take your machine learning models or statistical models and adjust analytics and put them on Sisense. So integration is key. I don't believe I can have the best set of tools I can integrate to the tools you use.
And then architecture
is to ensure this is all native cloud, Kubernetes, micro services, API first modern technology.
So it has the agility and flexibility you need.
So that's on that front. Instead of data,
we are not
replacing the need for data pipelines,
but we can take the data from any part in that pipeline, depends how mature it is. As I mentioned, if you're fully mature, we'll take it from your Redshift or Snowflake Ubiquiti.
If you're not, we can take it from the source data,
help you with data prep and acceleration of the data, and then
get it into the engine.
So that flexibility
is really designed to drive agility
because we found that if I'm part of someone's application,
their application changes days and nights. And I need to be very agile to allow them to
change with them and not slow down virginity.
So those are some examples of concepts we have in the product. As you mentioned, the Sisense
Unknown: business and platform has been around for a number of years now. So obviously there have been a lot of shifts in terms of the underlying technologies
or deployment patterns that you've been able to lean on as the surrounding ecosystem has grown and shifted to be very cloud oriented.
I'm wondering what are some of the most notable
evolutions or
reimaginings that you've had to go through in terms of the overall goals and design of the platform?
Unknown: It's a really good question. I've said there are 3 areas that we had to reimagine.
And reimagine, I'm the CEO, cost a lot of money also, but that's fine. It's a good investment.
Number 1
was around
the cloud.
People adoption of the cloud in the data and analytics space up until 5 years ago was very low.
People were terrified to leverage the cloud, even though other markets already did that.
For security, privacy,
governance,
compliance, all sorts of reasons.
And therefore, we've been forced to support a lot of on premise
environments and, you know, Windows machines, etcetera.
We have reimagined and re architected everything about 7 years ago, 6 years ago, and built it from the bottom up leveraging the latest cloud Kubernetes technologies.
That was a huge bet,
but now we have 1 of the most modern
application stacks or architectures out there as a result. That was number 1.
Number 2
is
the high performance databases or data warehouses.
Up until
Redshift and Snowflake and made it a big way kind
of broke the barrier.
Most
organizations databases were not analytical in nature.
In the SQL server, Hadoop, you know, the era of Hadoop
and lakes, etcetera,
but the compute was very slow. So we have to build those acceleration capabilities.
That has changed also in the last 5, 6 years
with the Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake,
Methode, RISE
that allows us to leverage those technologies and repeat native
native integration
already to r and d with those companies
to create
the ability to run analytics,
send the query to that environment, and come back with the answer.
That was the second 1. The third 1 is AI, AI machine learning.
What we
found I think we all know that the extreme rise in the capabilities
available to people and data scientists and companies out
there. And we decided to attack it in a weird way. We built 2 different set of tools, 1 for the data scientists that want to run their own models
in Sisense, in Python and R,
and we support that
with the whole, you know, ID environment, etcetera.
So it's very integrated
and that's typically not done inside analytical tools.
On the flip side, we built our own AI out of the box functionality, like the prediction power I told you about focusing
natural language
because the simple end users
need to also be serviced. So we use AI in 2 extremes for the
savvy developers, data scientists,
etcetera,
and for the end users who know nothing about it and make it transparent.
So those are the 3 areas I would say we have to really
rebuild everything bottom up. The 1 area we did not have to do it is APIs.
It was all built from APIs from the beginning.
By the way, not because we're geniuses, but because we have to compete in a very mature market. And the only way to do that is to create extensibility
in the product
for other people to build and integrate to.
The APIs today are a massive asset. We have hundreds of APIs
in the in the product that allow you to control everything.
You don't have to see any UI.
Everything from
flow to adding users, from security to
audits, from oversight to actual analytics and visualizations and acceleration.
That has been and continues to be a core fundamental
tenant in how we do things.
And I'm happy about that because the truth is, it's very hard to retroactively
retrofit the technology
to be API first. It's either is
or it's not.
I'm blessed by the fact that this team has built it the right way from the beginning.
Unknown: Another interesting aspect
of the question of business intelligence and the analytics layer is that
in addition to having gone through a bit of shift in terms
of what the kind of identity and use cases are that it's supposed to support,
it has also been starting to get subjected to the disaggregation
that the database market has already gone through. And, you know, the pendulum has shifted a few directions
in both ways,
most notably in terms of things like
security and access control, which was defaulting to the BI layer because that was where everybody interacted with the data. Now people are interacting in all kinds of different layers.
The question of the kind of semantic or metrics layer of, you know, how do I define what this business or domain object happens to be? Is that something that lives in BI? Is that something that lives in my warehouse? You know, how do I define it? Where do I define it? Just in those dimensions, I'm curious how you think about the role of Sisense and the kind of layers of the data stack and the data life cycle at which people are kind of directed or encouraged to interact with Sisense and sort of what the role of Sisense is across that life cycle?
Unknown: That's a beautiful question, and I believe
what we're doing is trailblazing. And I'll give you the basic example.
CICD,
version control.
Today,
the BI companies
that support version control, some do not. Let's put them aside. That's really bad. Those who support it have our own version control
component.
But why? Why is a BI company an expert in building version control technology?
So we took the opposite approach.
We integrate to your Git repository
with your Git tools,
your CICD processes,
your CICD
workflows.
Because I believe that if you build applications for a living and want to put analytics in it, you have the tools you already use and I should be part of Vend. So that's a great example. We're literally the only ones that we know of that are doing that in such way. You mentioned authentication and user management.
Yes. Technically, we have the ability to do our own user management,
but we support
5 different kinds of SSO,
integration of Okta and the like, user access tokens and tokenless and stateless environments and all sorts of chaos words,
all designed to fit the tools you use
in the applications you build.
I mentioned before, I can leverage the snowflakes of the world when they exist and the Python models you build when it exists.
But there, I let you leverage my
technology
because too many people don't have yet Snowflake
or don't have yet
data scientists to do the job.
So that's a place I'm still balancing
my own out of the box functionality with APIs outside.
1 day, the pendulum will shift and everyone will have their own tools and I will integrate to them as the main workflow.
So I'm a 1000% aligned with you and I believe we're it's a journey.
And if you take to the extreme,
BI companies will disappear and be turned into
ingredients
that are data ingredients, visualization ingredients,
etcetera.
And we're doing that at Sisense to ourselves. The company itself is built of different API components,
which we believe is the future. So, yeah, we're very aligned on that view of the future.
Unknown: As far as the
typical
user interaction
or the kind of onboarding process for somebody who wants to adopt Sisense and start using it for powering analytics, either for the traditional
BI dashboard use case or embedding it into their applications.
What does that kind of onboarding and user workflow look like, and how do the
touch points of the Sisense platform shift across the different
kind of data oriented and organizational oriented roles?
Unknown: Today, to consume Sisense or play around with it, you reach out to us
and we give you a proof of technology environment to play with.
And usually, it will be a specific project you want to demonstrate, you want to integrate into an application or build an application.
We don't sell individual user licenses. We'll try to, for free, do that project with you.
And then if it works,
you know, have a real relationship, then have individuals
trying to use it kind of it's a desktop tool. This is not a desktop tool.
The use cases will be typically to integrate us into an internal application that is serving your
employees.
For example,
Northern Trust put us in for cash management application rebuilt
or external application,
for example, part of a medical service you give someone or part of a inventory management service you give someone or marketing service you give someone.
We have people more and more trying to use us to integrate to productivity tools. So we have today native integration into Slack,
Excel,
PowerPoint,
Google Sheets.
This is where you consume the insights we generate
into those productivity tools versus a set dashboard.
Because, again, I believe that Inset should go to a URL,
not as a site application. So if you only do a statement in PowerPoint, I'm a CEO. I develop in PowerPoint.
Then my PowerPoint can get insights from Sisense and, literally, have on the screen a number or a widget,
a chart that comes from the Sisense server.
So that's how you interact with us.
The
1 use case I would tell you is not a good use for Sisense and I don't want to waste your time. If all you want is a generic dashboard that 10 different people can generate,
I can do it. It's not the best way to use me. I'm sure there's cheaper tools out there that will do it for you even for free.
But if you want to integrate,
embed, make it part of an application, productivity tool, internal or external,
we will shine and demonstrate the value to you and try it out.
Check how we do it. Go to sisense.com,
fill the form, say you heard me and you want to check me out and see if I'm speaking the truth, try it out.
Unknown: Data engineers don't enjoy writing, maintaining, and modifying ETL pipelines all day every day, especially once they realize that 90% of all major data sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce,
AdWords, Facebook, and Spreadsheets are already available as plug and play connectors with reliable intuitive SaaS solutions.
Hivo Data is a highly reliable and intuitive data pipeline platform used by data engineers from over 40 countries to set up and run low latency ELT pipelines with 0 maintenance.
Boasting more than a 150 out of the box connectors that can be set up in minutes, Hivo also allows you to monitor and control your pipelines.
You get real time data flow visibility with fail safe mechanisms and alerts if anything breaks, preload transformations and auto schema mapping precisely control how data lands in your destination,
models into workflows to transform data for analytics, and reverse ETL capability to move the transformed data back to your business software to inspire timely action.
All of this plus its transparent pricing and 247
live support makes it consistently voted by users as the leader in the data pipeline category on review platforms like g 2. Go to data engineering podcast.com/hebo
data today and sign up for a free 14 day trial that also comes with 247 support.
1 of the other aspects that we haven't dug into much yet is the question of bringing machine learning into the analytical workflow
where in a lot of cases, analytics and machine learning are seen as disparate or discrete activities where
I have my data warehouse, I do some I do some transformations and I can provide analytics from that and somewhere else either from my data warehouse or my data lake, I will build features and generate my machine learning model and that has a different application.
And I'm wondering what you see as the intersection between analytics and ML and AI and some of the ways that we can start to bring machine learning and AI capabilities
into the analytical workflow,
particularly to be able to support that end user who just wants to be able to ask a question and get an answer without having to figure out what are all the tables I have to join.
Unknown: Or not even ask the question. Just get the answer. Why ask questions?
I've seen AI machine learning
evolve over the last 20 plus years,
and I divide it into 3 buckets.
There is a lot of AI machine learning designed to do the data transformation,
which is not part of the BI tool, although we all have some basic functionality around it. And there's dedicated tools if you need to
from turning unstructured data sentiment analysis
all the way to dealing with very messy data and making it organized. Let's put that aside.
2nd is real time decision making transactional
tools
that I used to use in my
cybersecurity days when in real time at a nanosecond speed, you have to decide what to do. Put that aside as well. That's a very different set of technologies.
I used to build some. I know how we look. It's a different discipline.
And 3rd,
there's machine learning and AI designed to
help someone make decisions
better,
have better answers, sometimes without asking the questions,
get deeper insights sometimes without realizing we need to.
I believe that is analytics
and that is part of BI,
part of what we do every day.
And I will divide that into 2 buckets. Those that come out of the box and we have insights since from predictive power to explanation, to cause analysis, to linear regression,
to focusing,
etcetera.
Natural language, AI and LG and LP and LQ,
lots of fun stuff.
And
those that people have experts, data scientists or experts experts in their domain. For example,
in the medical space to look at an image
and say, cancer or not cancer.
Or
we work with with a lot of museums and cultural arts institutions.
What is the optimal pricing you should ask for a ticket because it's actually a donation. You can ask for any amount what the what is the right amount to us.
And here, data scientists should build the analytics on the side,
but in mind you deploy it inside a tool like Sisense
because there's no difference between a machine learning
spitting out a recommended price
to a forecast
or a linear regression, they all sit on the same data,
enjoy the same context layer, the same user context, the same visualization.
So I view that
and the funnel type as things that are part of behind the analytics products
just developed by the companies or by the data scientists in companies.
Unknown: As far as the kind of enablement
of allowing your customers to be able to incorporate
AI into that analytical workflow, what are some of the utilities that you provide either to
make the generation of those models turnkey and easy to do where you say these are the data points I'm trying to optimize, feed that into my down stream AI use versus
I have my own model that I want to develop and train but I want to run it in process with Sisense to make sure that it's able to work with those datasets that are embedded into this workflow? Great question. And you just answered it in the question already. We have 2 very different approaches, like like everything we do. For the very sophisticated
Unknown: developers, data scientists, data engineers,
we support
third party languages,
Python, SQL.
I don't believe in a proprietary language, so we don't have a mock up language like some vendors do and so on because
it's an open ecosystem
and I want you to use the tools you already know, just give it the language to run on Sisense.
For the built in AI to make the
human users that are not savvy,
more capable,
it's all
transparent.
It's like magic.
The AI just makes a suggestion.
You drag and drop
a a chart and it shows your prediction without asking it to show you. You type in English, you get an answer in English.
So it's really the same 2 extremes.
Very savvy people speaking the language they know, which is in this case, R, Python, SQL.
And the end users,
it's magic. They don't need to understand it. We just get answers.
Unknown: And that's the way it should be. I think the middle is not here, not there. In your work of helping to shepherd the Sisense product and working with your customers and end users, what are some of the most interesting or innovative or unexpected ways you've seen the Sisense platform used?
Unknown: I'm amazed every time at unexpected ways to use it.
I have seen during COVID,
a certain government
use our technology to decide which ventilator
to send to which
ZIP code
because we didn't have enough equipment in the country and they had to optimize
for endless parameters.
I have seen
the use case in health where it saves lives again and again.
We have
a state of Indiana, I believe it was,
used Sisense to build an application for donations.
It increased by 300%
the amount of donations people do, not for money,
for body parts after a loved 1 dies and they give away their,
you know,
body parts to save other lives.
300%
increase in donations of human body
parts to save lives, purely thanks to analytics.
I have seen Philips
using Sisense
to save unneeded anesthesia,
when a child goes through a CT or an MRI scan.
Apparently,
they put an STIGI or 2 of them so we don't move around because it breaks the scan in this big machine. And they use analytics to find which kids need it, which kids will behave,
and that will save unnecessary anesthesia.
The United Nation is using Sisense to help fight infectious diseases in Africa.
I've seen so many use cases save lives and help humanity
that I'm actually,
you know, I'm proud
to do good in the world and to help people. And, yes, we have the usual sales marketing, revenue generation, inventory management
use cases,
But it's the others, helping the teachers and the doctors and, you know, the world
environment and fighting COVID
and so on that
excites me and makes me sleep well at night and proud of what we do.
Unknown: And in your experience of leading this company and working with your customers, what are some of the most interesting or unexpected or challenging lessons that you've learned in the process?
Unknown: We are getting to a point in technology, which is quite scary that technology is not about the neck. It's imagination and culture.
That was not the case up until a few years ago.
I believe art is about to be there. Soon, art will not be about
the ability to draw, but the ability to imagine what you want to draw, then the AI will draw it for you.
So that's a fundamental shift that is happening in front of us, and it's not obvious.
So that's 1.
Number 2,
I find that organizations are sitting on a gold mine of data that they can monetize and turn into value
if only they wanted to.
People don't realize they sit on a gold mine. Imagine me telling you right now that under your churn, there's a big packet of gold and you're ignoring it.
That's how much data is out there waiting to be leveraged to do good to people,
businesses, and customers,
and employees, and health, and everything.
That's kind of
a unappreciated
asset
that is all around us. So that's the second 1.
And the third 1 is maybe the cloud from being
something everyone tell me I'm crazy to offer them
to asking me, why don't we run it on your cloud? That's a watershed moment that happened a few years ago,
and the industry at last
is there.
That changes many, many things because you can do things faster and cheaper on the cloud.
So those are some examples
I've been surprised to see the change.
Unknown: You touched on this a little bit earlier, but what are some of the cases where Sisense is the wrong choice?
Unknown: So the 2 areas I would not use Sisense. 1 is if you just want to build data pipelines.
I believe every analyst company claiming to be a data pipeline company is is already a problem to begin with.
Use dedicated tools to build the pipelines you need and then put the analytics on top.
I have the ability to do data prep, but if you need a dedicated product, go and get 1.
Number 2 is generic internal dashboards that are a dime a dozen and everyone can do. There's many ways to do it.
If you need to embed analytics
in
externally facing applications
or internally facing applications to your employees in a large enterprise, what have you, or to embed analytics in productivity tools like Slack or PowerPoint. Again, what whatever it is,
that's a significant
place. We cannot value
APIs,
developers,
people that want to leverage AI for mere mortals and human beings, not for BI experts.
That's where we add value. And that's where we add value these days.
Unknown: As you continue to build and grow the platform and company, what are some of the capabilities that you're looking toward for the near to medium term or any projects that you're excited to dig into?
Unknown: Something we just announced
is the next generation multi tenant capabilities.
What we found is that
most companies allow you to control
entities using the analytics.
Maybe you can control permissions, maybe the color.
We built the ability to granularly manage every feature, every function, every model, every permission, every look and feel
by a tenant in your organization. Could be a department,
an employee, or a customer.
That was a really complex engineering
project that is now out there and is already valuable to customers.
1 we are working on
is the next generation of APIs
that allow you
to come as a developer and get value overnight
without even spending a day to get the first value. We're very excited around that. And a lot of AI,
both AI for Miyamoto's
that don't know analytics and data
and AI for the data experts who know a lot of analytics and data
and can use those tools to be
innovative.
So those are things that excite me.
Unknown: Are there any other aspects of the work you're doing at Sisense or the overall space of business intelligence
and embedded and ubiquitous analytics that we didn't discuss yet that you'd like to cover before we close out the show?
Unknown: Maybe the 1 thing is that I see more and more organizations and children from this economy
monetizing
for data
into revenue streams, which is quite interesting.
So versus using data for to operate your business
is using data to make your offering to your customers more
rich and appealing.
And then reducing data to open a new revenue stream by selling data products and data services.
And in this economy, when people can find out they can
provide added value
and make money by leveraging the datasets they sit on, that's quite appealing to them. And everyone win. Their customers get more value, their company gets more value,
and their data experts get to do become more important because data was always a cost center
in organizations.
That's becoming a revenue center in some organizations, which is quite interesting.
Unknown: Well, for anybody who wants to get in touch with you and follow along with the work that you and your team are doing, I'll have you add your preferred contact information to the show notes. And
as the final question, I'd like to get your perspective on what you see as being the biggest gap in the tooling or technology that's available for data management today.
Unknown: Perfect. So first, if anyone wants to reach out, go to sisense.com,
s I s e n s e. Or if you want to reach out with me directly, LinkedIn,
Amir, a m I r, last name, Ored, o r e d. I'm happy to take your note. And then in terms of the biggest gaps in the industry,
I believe that still today,
80% of the humans are not enjoying
the power of modern data and modern analytics and modern AI.
That's a gap. That's a mistake
that we should all think about kind of in our daily occupation.
And second,
I believe that
in organizations,
the power of AI machine learning is still not understood widely enough
by the executives
to be leveraged
to make the impact it can make.
And that's, education,
knowledge,
Unknown: DNA, culture, imagination gap more than technology gap. It is not a technology gap. Well, thank you very much for taking the time today to join me and share the work that you and your team are doing at Sisense and some of the ways that you're working toward making analytics more
accessible and available and understandable for people both in and outside of organizations.
And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
Unknown: Thank you for listening. Don't forget to check out our other shows, podcast.init,
which covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used, and the Machine Learning podcast,
which helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site at dataengineeringpodcast.com.
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