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April 13, 2017

Sisense Adds Machine Learning to BI Platform

Machine learning continues to make serious inroads in big data markets, most notably in the automation of tedious business intelligence tasks. Among the emerging applications is discerning and highlighting patterns in enterprise data, then alerting users in real time to any anomalies.

That’s the premise of a new analytics platform designed to alert users to data deviations and unveiled this week by business analytics specialist Sisense. Its “Pulse” platform leverages machine learning to analyze complex data sets, and then alerts users to anomalies that can be used to track key performance indicators.

New York-based Sisense said the automation of performance tracking would free users from having to monitor multiple dashboards and tasks such as manually running analyses to spot anomalies.

“Businesses today are faced with more pressure than ever to quickly analyze and interpret intensely complex data,” Sisense CEO Amir Orad noted in a statement unveiling the new platform. Automating those processes using machine-learning tools meets the growing demand for “business intelligence and analytics tools that are proactive, intuitive and that enable them to take action in real time,” Orad added.

The new tool uses machine learning to discern key metrics based on historical data to determine “what is normal and what an acceptable variation is at any given moment,” the company said. Alerts are then generated when a key metric varies significantly from what the system has learned to be nominal.

The company also touts its machine learning capability as having a cascading effect for automating other business processes ranging from order placement to staffing requests. The goal is “simplifying [business intelligence] and data analytics for all users across the entire BI value chain,” Orad stressed.

Sisense is among a group of business intelligence specialists leveraging cloud and machine intelligence tools to help users access larger datasets while pushing analytics deeper into organizations. Their rise underscores growing demand for easier ways to extract valuable information, and vendors such as Sisense are responding with increasingly sophisticated capabilities.

Sisense appears to making headway in the crowded business analytics sector, moving up from the “niche players” category in last year’s Gartner “Magic Quadrant” rankings. The market researcher ranked Sisense among business intelligence “visionaries” in its 2017 ranking released in February, along with rivals such as IBM (NYSE: IBM), MicroStrategy and Salesforce.com. (NYSE: CRM).

The business intelligence “market is being dominated by vendors that are focused on agility and ease of use for business users coupled with the ability to govern deployments and promote the responsible creation, distribution and use of analytic content created within the platform,” the market researcher noted in its most recent rankings.

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