There is a race on to develop analytics software that can turn the vast amounts of data generated these days into something useful for businesses—and it will likely get harder to keep up.
Not only is there more data to deal with, new sources of information continue to emerge, further complicating the matter, says Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense in New York and Tel Aviv. “All around we’re deploying sensors,” he says. “You have sensors for the speed of the delivery guy on a motorcycle and the heat of the pizza as it gets to the customer.”
Analytics and business intelligence drawn from large data sets and from multiple sources usually run through big databases, Orad says, which can be a time-consuming process.
Sisense developed software that Orad says can more efficiently do the work typically handled by data warehouses, but with simpler hardware. He says CTO and co-founder Eldad Farkash started Sisense based on his theory that there could be faster ways to run complex analytics inside a standard CPU.
The company raised $50 million in January in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, to grow and scale up the business as well as develop its technology. Overall, Sisense has raised $100 million in funding, which Orad says will help the company open another office in the US—the location has yet to be decided—as well as additional offices in Europe and Asia.
Sisense wants to grow as an independent entity, Orad says, which will mean expanding in locales where skilled professionals are available for hire. For its next US office, Sisense is looking outside some of the usual innovation hubs though in order to find the talent pool it needs. “New York City is extremely crowded and competitive these days; California would be the same, so we’re looking for a place that is slightly less tapped,” Orad says.
Regardless, the company’s New York ranks are growing, with plans to expand the current staff of 80 in the city to at least 140 by the end of the year. “Eighteen months ago, there were just 20 people in our office in New York,” he says. Overall, Sisense expects to have 300 people on staff across the company by year’s end.
Prior to joining Sisense about a year ago, Orad co-founded Cyota, which was sold to RSA, and was CEO of Nice Actimize. He says Sisense is used by large enterprises such as Lockheed Martin and Motorola, as well as by small and midsize businesses. “All of them have the exact same issue,” he says. “They have large amounts of data or many sources and want to get insight out of them without waiting months, or spending a fortune.”
Even small companies, Orad says, might draw upon multiple information sources such as Salesforce, Facebook, demographic data, transaction data, and Web data and then want to combine that information to make better, more competitive decisions. He expects that trend to ramp up quickly. “Data is exploding all around us,” Orad says. “My average client today has more data than the NSA had 30 years ago.”
