Sage’s customers wanted more visibility into the talent searches it was performing and to dramatically outperform in the recruiting market. The company aimed to increase visibility into what people were doing, what was going on in the search, and also into their recommended strategy for searches. They wanted to differentiate themselves using technology.

Over the years, Syntelli Solutions has served over 100 clients across various industries, including banking, financial services, healthcare, and sports. The primary challenge is to help clients leverage data analytics platforms to gain actionable insights. Creating dashboards is easy, but deriving insights that improve market share or profitability is difficult. The key requirements are ease of use for all types of users and enterprise-class scalability.

Families have choices about where to send their students, so education, like other industries, has to demonstrate that it’s providing a value-added product. CNG seeks to be a top school in Colombia and Latin America to compete for excellent teachers in the international marketplace. The data comes from standardized testing companies as Excel files, and merging these data sources is error-prone. Additionally, the data in the student information system is manually entered by hundreds of teachers, leading to data quality issues. Without addressing these challenges, teachers would lack the information needed to develop interventions for students, and the school couldn't allocate financial resources effectively.

DATABASICS faced a significant challenge in providing flexible and powerful reporting options to its customers. Their in-house reporting engine was limited, requiring developers to code base reports that could only be updated with product releases. As the company began to include more complex data such as credit card transactions, travel data, and P-card programs, customers demanded more robust reporting capabilities. The internal teams also needed to provide training, custom reporting services, and faster responses to customer inquiries. The existing system was not scalable and lacked the flexibility to meet these growing demands.

Since 2000, the credit card industry in South Korea has grown rapidly, with credit card charges accounting for almost 80% of family expenditures. With 22 credit card companies in the market, competition is fierce. KB Card's existing campaign system was limited, sending non-customized offers via text messages, which were often seen as spam. This damaged the company's reputation and customer satisfaction. The company needed a way to reach the right customer at the right time with personalized offers to stand out in a highly competitive market.

Argos, a leading digital retailer in the UK, faced challenges in scaling its API infrastructure to support its growing digital retail capabilities. With 1 billion annual visits to its website, Argos needed a solution to empower its APIs for scale, data security, and multichannel innovation. The company identified unexpected opportunities for API use in various channels and parts of the business, necessitating a robust solution to manage and secure these APIs across multiple platforms.

WeFi’s database team had been manually running SQL queries, but they struggled to generate the reports that gave the management team crucial feedback. WeFi needed to perform advanced analysis on large amounts of data in three categories: the behavior of millions of WeFi users, including retention activity and data acquisition activity; the performance and activity of wireless networks to which its users are connected; and the activity records of active clients. The average table sizes for these categories were more than 5 million rows, 70 million rows, and 500 million rows respectively.

The operational data at OHT consists of over 20-million records in a 100GB MySQL database. Lior knew that they were collecting all the information he needed to get insights, but he simply couldn’t get to it. Transaction data was coming in pretty fast and, in order to continue to be an industry leader, he needed a way to get a 360 degree view of his business as fast as possible. Lior had various ad-hoc and separate solutions running to try and achieve the reporting and analytics the company needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. He would often rely on someone from R&D to extract reports or would end up manually doing reporting in Excel, which would take weeks. These efforts were taking significant resources, both human and computer, to try and get the reports that were needed. Many of their analytics requirements were not being met at all, which was leading to a lot of frustration within the company.

Trupanion faced challenges in managing and analyzing large volumes of data across multiple departments. The company needed a solution to track real-time performance, optimize marketing opportunities, and build accurate financial reports. Existing in-house solutions were time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies, leading to a need for a robust BI tool that could be easily used by non-technical users and deployed quickly.

Sonny explains that before Sisense, company resources would be invested in reigning in data and wrestling with the complicated process of aggregating, processing and delivering it to the client. “We would build a bunch of pivot tables in Excel on numerous tabs, and then we would give people an import function that would import the raw data so that they could see the dynamic reports in Excel. But there were a number of problems, for example Excel would limit the amount of rows in a report, or the report was slow, or people just didn’t know how to use it.” Sonny also mentions that another significant problem was the task of distributing the data reports to thousands of different clients. To keep the reports current and updated, clients had to manually re-import the data, and eventually customization requests demanded even more time and resources, per client. “Overall, there just wasn’t control over what was happening. On top of that, if I had to update the report configuration, I had to send out thousands of new Excel files that had all the pivot tables defined in them. And ultimately every customer would need us to modify their pivot tables. It was just a nightmare.”

Ignite Media processes massive amounts of data, maintaining approximately 3 TB of transaction, demographic, and media performance data. They had been building all their reporting internally using PHP and .Net, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to scale. Writing new reports from scratch to follow a 'hunch' could take weeks, making it impractical to test new ideas. The company had valuable data but lacked the resources to fully leverage it. Mazda Ebrahimi, the VP of Application Development, sought a solution that would allow them to produce results faster and more easily without sacrificing their intellectual property.

The hotel industry faces significant challenges with scattered and inconsistent data sets from multiple sources, making it difficult to centralize IT and gain meaningful insights. Property management businesses often use on-site, Windows-based hardware that requires dedicated maintenance personnel, further complicating data integration. Bahadour Moussa, a Technology Evangelist, recognized the need for a BI tool that could store, clean, and prepare data before visualization, enabling hotels to analyze guest behavior and enhance their experience. The search for a suitable BI tool led to the discovery of Sisense, which met the criteria of ease of use, attractive UI, and the ability to connect to complex data sources without requiring ETL work.

Advocate’s old system had problems with speed and scalability. It could take multiple hours to produce an extract, often timing out during the process and failing. On top of this, it was very slow to refresh, was dated, and most importantly, could not handle their growing amounts of data.

Casumo employees were not able to create their own business reports without the assistance of the data team and lacked information about crucial departmental KPIs. Emanuele decided it was time to move beyond time-consuming manual reporting, creating a forward-thinking approach to company data with standardized reporting and a centralized BI system. This would allow company employees to successfully integrate their own data sources and develop easily understood business reports, complete with data drill-down and ad-hoc reporting. After discovering Sisense online, Emanuele decided to move forward with a free trial. He was immediately impressed with Sisense’s ability to quickly connect to its Amazon Redshift database and crunch data into the Elasticube. The performance was significant, allowing him to generate useful reports on the very first day. Sisense gave Emanuele an end-to-end solution for ETL and reporting. He found that with just one hour of introduction to Sisense for his users, they were able to build their own dashboards and start getting the insights that they needed to effectively do their job, with minimal support from his staff.

After a huge restructuring effort, FirstPort realized that its organizational decision making was in need of a serious overhaul. Monthly board meetings were led by senior department managers, all with conflicting agendas and data to match. At this point in time, no one could even say with any certainty the amount of properties FirstPort managed. According to Alex, “If you asked three people you’d get three different answers.” Alex recognized the opportunity to not only unify the organization’s decision making process, but lead the company into a golden era of insight. FirstPort was generating so much data from its day-to-day operations, customer queries, financial information, and new business opportunities that they were overwhelmed. They knew they could add value and make improvements for both the customers and company if they could just tap into the data. Alex and his team needed to drive improvements in data related reporting and decisions for customers and staff members, yet lacked the necessary tools and resources to do so, having only Excel and Powerpoint. To meet their objectives, they estimated that it would take up to one year of effort if they doubled the size of their existing BI team of five. Alex decided that the right direction for FirstPort was automating as much of the data cleansing and analysis as possible, and to focus the BI team’s talents on analysis rather than ETL. On top of this, Alex needed a vendor that could do all of this in a reasonable period of time - days or weeks, not months or years.

Sonic Automotive, Inc., a Fortune 500 company, needed to ensure that executives and management had 24-7 access to daily business tracking metrics via a mobile platform. The company aimed to achieve mobility by investing heavily in Apple mobile technology, deploying iPads and iPhones to the executive team, regional management, and dealership management. In March 2010, Sonic began identifying potential partners to assist with the development of mobile apps that would enable their business processes and provide a platform to bring mobile business intelligence and reporting to the leadership. After a failed pilot with another provider, Sonic reached out to MicroStrategy to explore the potential benefits of mobile apps.

Due to the sovereign debt crisis, Novo Banco acquired a large volume of real estate assets. Managing these assets was challenging as field sales managers had to use multiple tools to access pictures, details, and financial data. This fragmented approach was inefficient and time-consuming, necessitating a more streamlined and centralized solution.

Technological advancement, growing data production, and new consumer demands create challenges for organizations—and when these companies are as complex and established as TAP, the challenges get more complicated. TAP needed to ensure high data quality, agile business processes, and user autonomy, as well as utilize technological trends like big data, IoT, and machine learning. An analysis of the company’s BI infrastructure and business processes identified the need for a unified strategy capable of responding to the analytical needs of various departments. Silos from individual teams restricted data governance and created isolated reports that were not useful company wide. Previous BI initiatives were enacted “without total commitment of all business areas and [were] very focused on each business information silo,” said Rui Monteiro, BICC Manager at TAP.