Big Data analytics skeptics like analyst Rob Enderle suggest that companies too often choose a Big Data strategy simply because the competition does the same. “The sad reality is that most firms selling and buying are focused on the technology, not the problem,” he says. “If you don’t understand the problem that you are trying to solve with this massively expensive technology, the result will be an equally massive waste of money.”

SiSense, Inc. CEO Amit Bendov basically agrees with Enderle, but he thinks the solution is more analysis, not less. Investing in SiSense’s holistic solution, which allows companies to join, analyze, and visualize all the data they want, is like investing in one’s health, he says . More analytics ultimately encourages collaboration, saves time and yields unexpected insights. Basically, you can’t have too much data.

Beyond the hype: The real benefits of Big Data analytics

“Buying a solution in search of a problem isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he says. “Once you see the sunlight you can detect a lot of other things.”

Bendov says one reason companies implement analytics is to discover insights they don’t expect. “Sometimes the sole purpose is that we know there are a lot of things to find but we’re not even sure what they are.”

SiSense’s mission is to give customers the freedom to discover. “SiSense allows you to analyze Big Data on a shoestring budget,” he says. “No need for large IT teams, no need for special appliances. You just download the software, several thousand bucks, and can you very quickly find out if you have an issue or an opportunity.  Almost everybody has something to fix.”

Reducing the cost of analytics ultimately makes us all smarter, Bendov says. Drawing an analogy to the cost of genome sequencing, he adds, “If the tests costs five thousand dollars, then maybe it’s not worth is because you don’t know what you’re going to find. But what if it cost a buck? Wouldn’t everybody do it?”

While the ROI of business intelligence analytics may be difficult to measure, SiSense clients suggest it is still very much real. “High-performing companies and employees are hungry for data; once that hunger is there, SiSense is a great tool for feeding it,” says TJ Houk, VP Business Intelligence of Trupanion, Inc., a Seattle-based provider of health insurance for pets. 

If companies aren’t data-driven, then having a BI platform is unlikely to help, Houk said. “I would recommend companies invest in people who will be champions and use data to manage their teams and processes,” he says.

The round-about way to ROI

For Eric Mason, director of marketing and communications at web development platform Wix.com, benefits can be indirect.

While he declined to give specifics, Mason said SiSense has helped his company make better and quicker decisions. Mason commends SiSense’s visualization features, which make the data more democratic and accessible to team members without data science backgrounds. “I know that if we’re making better, more well-informed decisions, with better sets of data that everyone in the room can actually see and have insight on, the natural outcome of that is a better-run organization and is going to affect your bottom line,” he said

Wix works with campaigns that require near real time analytics, which SiSense software also supports. Mason notes: “[It’s] really streamlined the time frame which we are able to look at,” he said.

Trupanion’s Houk noted that the most tangible ROI for his company has been time savings and the reduced personnel cost: Prior to implementing SiSense, many of the company’s reports were compiled manually. “We would need at least one full-time employee to deliver our key metrics,” he adds.

Bendov says that SiSense’s enhanced efficiency yields major cost savings as companies can receive insights in half a day that take other solutions weeks or  months to produce. The speed affords companies the option to “only spend thousands of dollars, or maybe tens of thousands, but not millions,” according to Bendov.

Choosing the best analytics vendor

Most companies can benefit from an agile infrastructure that can quickly change as more data is added, either in size or data sources. SiSense aims to provide ease of change and speed of deployment. Traditional enterprise BI tools are robust, ” but they are complicated, and not easy to use, and that’s why these projects are failing and companies are ripping them out right now,” he said. “So, less is more in this case.”

For Trupanion, what distinguishes SiSense is its structure and scalability: “Many tools only assist in visualizations, which is only helpful if the data is clean and well structured,” he said. “SiSense provided us that structure. It allows for clean display of many metrics in dashboard form.

“Transparency is a key value at Trupanion and we want to get our key company metrics in the hands of all our employees,” Houk adds. “SiSense allows us to do that.”

At the end of the day, Big Data analytics is a tool, not a solution. As Bendov says: “[If] I’m interested in a house I don’t care about how it’s built, if it’s a cement mixer or hammers or whatever. These are just tools. The real issue is will I get a beautiful house that is safe and environmentally friendly? That’s what I care about, not the tools.” The larger question will always be, “What do we want for our company?” as opposed to “What do we want for our data strategy?”. Still, when data is essential to a company, these questions are inextricably linked. When the health of a corporation and the efficiency of its data go hand-in-hand, the right tools, in the hands of smart people, can make a difference.