I spent two days last week at the sold out Sisense Eureka Users Group Meeting in NYC. I learned so much, met some great folks and came away more excited than ever about the future of Sisense. I'll try to give you some highlights without violating the NDA.
Since this post is long, I've moved a copy of my final thoughts to the top for those who don't want to wade through the entire post.
My Takeaways:
If you aren't using analytics to improve your business today, you are falling behind. Your competitors are using it.
Predictive Analytics using various AI techniques is ready now to impact your business. Sisense has and will shortly be releasing new capabilities you need in this area.
Sisense is investing heavily in advancing their state of the art tool and looking after customers. In my mind, this makes them a pretty compelling bet.
You should attend Sisense Eureka next year.
Day 1
Amir Orad, Sisense CEO, gave a great keynote on the Sisense' Analytics Vision and the progress of the Sisense journey with a few hints of things to come.
Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto, gave an overview of AI Prediction Machines. His main point was that Prediction Machines work today and that many practical problems can be framed as Prediction problems. Before his talk was finished I ordered his book: Prediction Machines - The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. It's pretty obvious Sisense is working down this path from some other topics presented.
Jen Underwood, Impact Analytics, spoke on Augmented Analytics and their readiness for use today. Jen is an authority in the Analytics space and I highly recommend her BLOG for folks following analytics.
Boaz Farkash, Sisense Product Manager, gave an overview of new product features coming this year (some exciting ones as soon as next month). I've worked with Boaz for 4+ years and he is great!
I missed the breakout sessions while talking with a prospective customer about their upcoming needs. But the rest of the sessions I did get to were very worthwhile.
Sham Sokka, Philips, spoke on how Philips Healthcare is using Sisense based analytics to improve both their customers and their own bottom lines. Phillips connects all their medical scanners and equipment to the IOT and analyzes the data with Sisense. Impressive!
Nick Mehta, Gainsight, and Gali Kedar, Sisense VP Customer Success, described how Sisense has partnered with Gainsight to use their own tool (Sisense) to provide analytics to promote customer satisfaction. Gali described how every role at Sisense is measured on how they contribute to Customer Success and of course they monitor the results with Sisense dashboards!
Day 1 ended with a nice cocktail party at a hotel rooftop bar. I was on the first of a number of buses and the only photo I took was before the crowd got there.
Day 2: Day 2 got off to an incredible start:
Billy Beane, General Manager Oakland A's, told his story on turning the Oakland A's into a Baseball World Champion and perpetual contender using the power of analytics. His story was recounted in the book, Moneyball, and made into a movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy. He had some great anecdotes on working with Brad Pitt, but the real impact of his talk was on how analytics based decision making (as opposed to traditional player scouting) transformed the Oakland team. It made them contenders while spending 1/3 of the $ of the big market clubs. Indeed, he transformed baseball as all the other major league teams now have an analytics department. The value of analytics has now been recognized by the NFL and NBA.
Bobby Ghoshal, ResMed, spoke on how they use IOT monitoring of their CPAP devices and Sisense based Analytics to improve patient care results, and their resellers and their own bottom lines.
I attended a Breakout Session where David Siegel, Investopedia, described how they used Sisense Analytics to drive their audience and revenue.
I then attended another Breakout Session. Mark Hopkins, Skullcandy, reviewed their use of Sisense Analytics across their headphone business worldwide supply chain to improve efficiencies and drive down cost. One of several examples he shared was driving down return fraud by more than 50%. He also demonstrated their use of the Sisense Alexa skill to assist their CEO with a recap of quarterly sales metrics at a recent company meeting.
I went to another Breakout where PeggySue Werthessen, Sisense; TJ Houk, Trupanion (pet medical insurance); and James Davision, Celestica (contract circuit board manufacturing), shared some interesting insights on their implementations of Advanced Analytics in conjunction with Sisense. In particular, James related their experience integrating "R" with Sisense that was informative.
Paul Zolfaghari, Sisense Board Member and former CEO of MicroStrategy, related his experience with change in the analytics space over the last 20 years. He asserted that the space is being revolutionized by AI technology. He emphasized that this revolution is happening now.
Guy Levy-Yurista, Sisense Labs, wrapped up the conference by addressing the work that has come out of Sisense Labs in the last 18 months such as the Amazon Echo and Sisense Bulb technologies. He then demonstrated several upcoming technologies:
Sisense Boto: A Sisense chat bot technology integration through Skype, Slack and Facebook Messenger. Available now without a Sisense license to analyze data and provide natural language and automatic chart insights from CSV file uploads. Boto is also integrated directly into Sisense to provide chat based natural language insights from Sisense dashboards.
Sisense BloX: BloX will provides a new widget that can easily be customized with JSON and HTML scripting. Can really dress up a dashboard. Coming very soon! (Update: Was released concurrently with v7.2. Have been playing with this afternoon. Very neat).
Sisense Insight Miner: Adds new predictive Analytics to Sisense. Multiple prediction types. Very cool and much on target with the theme of many speakers. Coming soon.
Sisense FliX - The ONE I CAN'T TALK ABOUT: I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. I have no doubt that it will revolutionize the uptake of analytics by executives. I'm hoping for late this year, but we'll see.
Final Thoughts
What an amazing two days! If I had to boil it down to a few themes, I would say:
If you aren't using analytics to improve your business today, you are falling behind. Your competitors are using it.
Predictive Analytics using various AI techniques is ready now to impact your business. Sisense has and will shortly be releasing new capabilities you need in this area.
Sisense is investing heavily in advancing their state of the art tool and looking after customers. In my mind, this makes them a pretty compelling bet.
You should attend Sisense Eureka next year. This was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. I have been to Microsoft events with 10,000+ attendees that were not as well done. I learned a lot from both the sessions and talking to other users, got to catch up with a number of folks, met with some current customers, got some leads/referrals and had a great time! How could it have been better! The Sisense team has really set a high bar for future events.