Customer Case Studies

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• The Visual Environment: Using SiSense to Visualize Carbon Footprints

  Increasing regulatory measures, the focus on corporate social responsibility and rising energy costs are forcing companies to reassess the impact of environment issues and energy use on their business bottom line.

  Measuring carbon emissions and the efforts to reduce them are increasingly becoming an area of focus for many companies.

  Enter The Visual Environment. The Visual Environment is a UK-based company founded by Calum Miller and Patrick Hodgson. It invented, designed and developed unique software: video-miles®. It tracks video conferencing activities to help companies measure and track their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint.

  Although it is clear that videoconferencing reduces carbon emissions by reducing travel, this benefit has not been measurable. Most videoconferencing users are unable to access Environmental, Financial, Utilization and Performance data and turn it into accurate measurements of their carbon footprint. As a result, existing video conferencing users end up using labor intensive manual efforts to analyze data that at best leads to assumption, inaccuracy, higher cost, lower utilization, frustration, slower decision-making and reduced deployment of video conferencing systems.

   

   

  The key to The Visual Environment's products and services is the accurate measurement of video conferencing and its translations into measureable reports and dashboards at the click of a mouse. This is what has earned it the trust of partners such as Polycom Inc and customers from all sectors such as finance (a Major American International Bank), legal firms, retail, leisure, manufacturing and petrochemical companies. This is part of a trend of emissions measurement by large corporations, as a precursor to emissions management and trading.

  Defining key performance indicators and the setting up of accurate monitoring is the first step towards the establishment of a green business intelligence practice. This is key to the organization's accurate assessment of its green efforts – "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it".

  This is exactly what The Visual Environment does. It sets up a system to pull in all data related to the use of video-miles® and the resulting reduction in miles travelled. Data is brought in using the Company's Fetchit software. Data comes in from all end-points on the network: video conferencing devices, systems deployed at employee's desks and home etc. The Visual Environment uses SiSense's Prism software to create custom reports for each of its customers and partners. SiSense's Prism software was selected for its asset management, ease of use, low total cost of ownership and the quick set up. It required very little training and thus was immediately useful to the Company.

  Dashboards show carbon emissions saved, money and time saved by less travel, top performing locations in terms of saving carbon emissions, and the least performing locations. A complex pivot shows which locations communicate with others, collaborating in the video miles savings.

  Once the right KPIs have been defined and measured, the companies using the solution have ongoing control of the operational environment. This not only ensures compliance but also serves as a starting point for future process improvements that will lead to even greater reduction in carbon emissions.

• Wix.com: Using Business Intelligence for Instant Web Analytics and Reporting

  Wix.com, a leader in fast and easy graphical content generation on the web, uses SiSense's Prism to assist it in the process of optimizing traffic generation and converting its users to premium services.

  Using web analytics to drive user conversion

  Wix is a content generation tool for high-end graphics web sites. Wix lets you make stunning flash web pages with no more effort than creating presentation slides. The Wix beta launched in mid 2008 as a free service. In late 2008 Wix revealed its monetization model – charge users $5-10 for premium features. As of writing this case study (November, 2008), there are over a quarter million Wix users, all of them power users who use Wix to build several sites and generate a large amount of content. Wix had become, in a relatively short while, a very complex site. Monetization became a process that needs to be closely monitored and managed.

  Ad-hoc MySQL Analysis and Reporting – easy, quick and lowest cost

  "The site mushroomed; there are 20 million views of Wix widgets and a similar count of page views. There are multiple traffic sources and a conversion process that is relatively lengthy" begins Avishai Avrahami, Co-founder and co-CEO of Wix. Part of his role is to optimize conversion and understand it, managing AdWords, traffic sources and a host of other drivers.

  The data comes in from the Wix application, Google AdWords and Wix billing. "It had taken some time to set up all the data in MySQL", says Avrahami, "this took the most time". Now Wix required access and analysis. "I needed to find what I call a 'presentation layer' for the data", he explains.

  Finding the right tool for rapid analysis and fast report creation

  Web Analytics at Wix is a succession of real-time ad-hoc analytics and then reporting of the results. Reports are distributed several times a day. "The management team wants to see what drives conversion, which of our traffic sources are profitable and by how much" says Avrahami.

  He tried some of the classic reporting tools. "We live in the digital age" he says of them, scrolling down one of the ten Prism dashboards he uses. "I never print my reports so tools that require me to define pages for printing are out of the question."

  Google Analytics, although useful for a high level snapshot, was not granular enough. "Analytics systems like Google Analytics are very rigid", says Avrahami "When you drill down all you do is change some parameters, but you still end up looking at the same user group from a different angle".

  Avrahami can write SQL queries, and the company had no shortage of IT staff or programmers. But writing SQL queries for quick and dirty ad hoc analysis took too long. It wasn't accessible to less technical members of the marketing team. It also required a full time employee and several hours to check each hypothesis.

  Using Prism: fast, cheap and exactly what Wix needed

  It was then that Avrahami happened upon SiSense Prism. It was exactly what he was looking for. "Setting up Prism took a fraction of the time of setting up MySQL" he says. "Prism lets us create a visible system for the management team. We didn't need fancy visualization; we needed a front end that lets us quickly research a hunch. We can then send everyone the results as a report. We're a curious bunch: every day someone else has an idea of how to optimize the system. With Prism we can check it immediately and then, in a matter of minutes, publish a report for everyone to see". Since the reports are interactive, they let viewers filter, sort and sum the data.

  Avrahami points at one of the Prism widgets he often uses: time aggregations (by week, day, month, quarter). "I can do this in SQL" he says "but I need to be able to generate a report in a minute. I love the ability to analyze the data at the marketing level without asking the R&D people to do this. Using prism profoundly affected the way Wix conducts their business. "Prism allowed us to immediately change the way we use our channels and drive traffic".

  How

  Reports are generated to see:

  How many premium users sourced from which domain.

  Analyze how each traffic source generates revenues.

  Figure out where users are lost in the acquisition process, a multiple step process, and what and how long it takes for a user to become a power user.

  How to price traffic sources.

  Time to purchase of various user groups and optimize sales efforts accordingly.

• Saving Aliens with Business Intelligence: the save an alien story

  Roy Man, the CTO of saveanalien.com, has strong opinions about web analytics.  He is also in the business of saving aliens.

   

  First, to get the alien-saving story out of the way, I asked Roy for a brief explanation about the genesis of his site. Roy is one of the founders of a virtual alien (pet) site called saveanalien.com. Save an alien has 10 million unique aliens (each alien is one of a kind) and they are all up for adoption. The reason so many aliens are looking for a home is that "a meteor was heading towards their planet. They were going to die in 6 months if we didn't help..."

   

  Save an alien is "aimed at saving 10 million aliens from death". This is done by feeding and caring for the alien, traumatized by the meteor crash and the subsequent floating in space. Aliens are flex clients developed with Ruby on Rails. The whole infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3). The more care and virtual money earned by an alien-adopter, the better off the alien is – in terms of housing, furniture, looks, clothes etc.

   

  In terms of Web Analytics, Roy has strong opinions. "We do the Web Analytics that everyone should do, although most sites don't". The philosophy is to constantly measure the value of each user, understand what they do and know what their lifetime value is. While all of this makes absolute sense, current web analytics approaches don't make the cut, and this is why the saveanalien.com team decided to use the power of business intelligence to measure and track its users' data and behavioral profiles.

   

  The problem lies in the nature of the aggregation provided by most web analytics tools. "They tell you how many people viewed pages, entered the site and took pictures of themselves with their alien, but the reporting is based on counting events rather than associating an action with a user". Roy's example is that current tools can tell him that 1000 alien-with-loving-human photos were taken and posted on the site. But he can't tell whether one user posted 999 of those photos, or whether the photograph-taking was distributed more evenly among users. But the difference between the two cases is huge, and understanding the way users behave both individually and en masse is key to performing the analytics that will make the site a better one.

   

  Roy wants to follow individual users on a statistically relevant way, without performing aggregations and counts that obscure the real workings of the site.

   

  If web stats get too aggregated, "I can't tell which percent of users did what, I can't tell whether users who joined us two months ago are still around or whether they've been replaced by new users. They all get lumped together in current web analytics approaches. But I want to be able to see what each user is doing and understand how groups of users behave".

   

  Roy uses SiSense to see how users behave over time, and which users form the bulk of activity for any given day. It is important to understand, for instance, how long it takes a typical user to begin using the social functions of the site.

  Roy uses MySQL to store the millions of rows of data saveanalien.com has generated so far. He says that using MySQL was a no-brainer – it was cost effective, available on Amazon Web Services and robust enough to manage the data. He then analyzes the data using a powerful analytics, dashboard and visualization tool, SiSense Prism.

   

  Setting up Prism took him half an hour; he constantly iterates the reports and authors new ones. Data is analyzed daily and then sent to company-wide distribution. "Without SiSense I would have needed to develop this myself". If he would have done this rather than use SiSense's common sense approach to business intelligence, he wouldn't have had time to save aliens.

   

• Taking Enterprise Resource Planning into the Analytics Age

  INTEGRAL ERP has been offering its ERP software to a growing customer base for the past 25 years.  Today, the company offers an end-to-end ERP system with  Marketing & Sales, CRM, Logistic, inventory, Manufacturing Financial and Service modules. Its International customer base includes more than 22,000 users and serves small and medium sized enterprises in Israel, Japan, China and Thailand.

   

  "Intergral ERP is dedicated to providing its customer the best and most up-to-date ERP system that was purpose built to cover all the needs of a small or medium enterprise" said Orly Shefa-Shaked, INTEGRAL's CEO. "As customer needs evolved and they became exposed to analytics capabilities as part of their online presence, the need to add business intelligence, i.e. reporting, dashboarding and analytics, became clear. We wanted to continue to add value to our users and offer them anything from simplified reporting to the ability to perform visual ad-hoc analytics".

   

  When INTEGRAL ERP began offering an e-commerce management module to its customer base, customers asked whether they can use, through INTEGRAL, something that will give them a snapshot of their business, very much like the way Google Analytics gave them information about their web traffic. The requirements were a tool that would be easy to integrate and that would not be a burden on Integral's existing programming and technical staff.

   

  SiSense Prism was chosen to power Integral's move into the analytics age, with a strong emphasis on executive dashboards to give immediate, real information about the business. "we chose SiSense because it was easy and immediate, yet powerful" explains Nathan Aharonovich, the project manager from INTEGRAL ERP, "First of all, at Integral we found it easy to integrate SiSense Prism into our ERP offering. SiSense prism works well with Oracle SQL, which is the basis of our ERP system. The fact that we did not have to invest in specific database development was a huge benefit to us. Today, we can show end to end dashboards for the business, as well as dashboards for each of the separate modules we sell. More importantly, we are certain that customers will find the INTEGRAL ERP BI module based on SiSense system, easy enough to learn, so that customers will be able to define reports by themselves and require little or no training".

   

  "The SiSense integration allowed us to bring in best-of-breed analytics capabilities to our widely-used ERP, yet without requiring a heavy and rigid resource investment from our side. In this way, we can offer our customers much greater value, answer their analytic needs and make the Intergral ERP system evolve", finalizes Orly Shefa-Shaked, Integral's CEO.

   

• Jordan Kitt's Music Deploys Business Intelligence over SQL Server

   From the July/August Edition of Information Management Magazine:

  REVIEWER: Gary Hannon, IT manager, Jordan Kitt’s Music.

  BACKGROUND: Jordan Kitt's Music is a piano retailer. Since 1912, it has served more than a 250,000 satisfied customers and represents the world's finest piano manufacturers in major markets that include Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Atlanta.

  PLATFORMS: In the recent past, Jordan Kitt's Music migrated its legacy database into SQL Server, storing several million rows of data. One of the motives for the change was to support better executive management reporting. The SiSense Prism solution runs on a desktop computer.

  PROBLEM SOLVED: At Jordan Kitt's Music, IT is responsible for the creation and delivery of executive-level reporting and dashboards. The company used reporting tools, but the result was numerous detailed reports that ran overnight. Executive management needed something better. A "classical" business intelligence solution required the purchase and setup of numerous modules, transforming and moving the data around. It also meant an upfront investment of $25,000. Given the current economic climate, it was decided to put the project on hold. Enter SiSense Prism. Its desktop-based BI solution connects directly to SQL Server, creating a live dashboard over the data. Setup freed the company from the back-end work required to run other solutions. The easy creation of dashboards is comparable to other solutions; the key to success was the ability to set up a BI practice with no programming, scripting or numerous back-end modules.

  PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: SiSense Prism provides BI software for visualization, analysis, dashboarding and reporting. SiSense lets us perform complex analytics without building a middle tier for the data, so no scripting, programming or IT efforts are required. The application connects to the data source and allows the users to define each of its components as a measure or dimension. Once this is defined, the application creates a dimensional model on the fly, freeing us from the need to create an OLAP. Additional measures can be calculated in multidimensional formulas. The application supports visualization, definition of reports and the ability to share the data by using a viewing function. Reports are interactive, and viewers can sum and filter the data in the report.

  STRENGTHS: One main strength is the solutions’s value for the money: We pay $110 monthly. There is no backend work since the product connects to SQL directly. We also have the ability to see all data, live, and to serve executive dashboards without a full-scale deployment.

  WEAKNESSES: The product had some rough spots, mostly learning-curve issues around connecting existing data sets to Prism gadgets. In addition, we'd like to see the product working on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms, so that executives can view dashboards on the go using mobile devices.

  SELECTION CRITERIA: We chose the solution based on the ease of implementation and the fact that it leveraged the original SQL Server investment.

  DELIVERABLES: The key deliverable is a main dashboard that provides a daily snapshot of KPIs.

  VENDOR SUPPORT: We receive 24 to 48 hour technical support via email. SiSense techs are knowledgeable about the product.

  DOCUMENTATION: Documentation is available online and via PDF download.