Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud vs. Sisense

Informatica Cloud is a great tool for use when data must be formatted consistently. Once configured, it is very robust and reliable. It is also well-suited for an organization without a robust IT staff to maintain a full server infrastructure. It offers a cost-effective approach to high-quality data integration for even the largest organizations. Organizations without staff experienced in data analytics may find it challenging to take advantage of the more complex results of this tool.

Incentivized

I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.

Incentivized

• Once the secure connection is established it’s quite easy to operate and create new jobs. The controls are simple, and we appreciate the fact there are not a lot of complex fine-tunings required. Navigation is also easy, and we enjoy the ability to open multiple tabs in the browser to work on multiple projects.
• The monitoring functionality works well to help track the progress of the jobs, again, without too much complication. In a fast dev environment, speed is essential and we quickly seeing the status/progress of jobs as well as any errors if the jobs fail helps us maintain speed.
• The web interface is a lot easier to interact with than the client/on-prem version. Putting much of the heavy lifting of interacting with the tool onto the shoulders of the browser makes it easier to keep multiple sessions open and get in/out quickly without having to VPN into the office.

Incentivized

• Customization - lots of supported and community plugins available. Users can also adjust the look and feel through JavaScript.
• Innovation - Sisense is continuing to push the envelope by developing new features through Sisense Labs.
• Customer support - the commitment to excellent customer service and ensuring organizations get the most out of their investment.

Incentivized

• The User Interface can be a bit difficult to get in initial stages.
• Error messages are hard to understand which sometimes takes a lot of time for the resolution
• Cannot Implement complex SQL queries which should be fixed in future release.

Incentivized

• The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
• Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
• If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.

I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.

New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail

There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.

SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.

I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.

Incentivized

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.

Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.

Remember to migrate the plugins. The documentation however is pretty straight forward.

First, the wizard is easy to use making the learning curve for simple ETL tasks nice. Second, since Informatica is mature there are a good variety of connectors available. Finally, we have driven some fairly complex ETL solutions using only the cloud.

Incentivized

1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.

2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.

Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.

• Cut costs on the number of staff we need for data import.
• Cut costs for automation that can be done for data that no longer has to be manually imported.
• We've saved countless dollars by eliminating duplicates in our system with this tool.

Incentivized

• Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
• Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
• A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
• We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users