Sisense vs. TIBCO Data Virtualization

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

TIBCO Data Virtualization is well suited for customers who are challenged to deal with extracting data from dozens of different sources and systems, and do not have the time and liberty to hire data engineers and/or ETL developers to write dozens or hundreds of complex ETLs. However, there are situations where TIBCO Data Virtualization severely underperforms, and those are where we are dealing with large volumes of data, in tera bytes or peta byte scale system. For example, a messaging queue which sends 200 million messages every hour will choke TIBCO Data Virtualization if the technology is chosen to route the data.

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

• Connecting to different data silos and presenting the data as a singled unified layer of data.
• Exposing data to Technical and non technical users through Web UI or reporting tools
• Secured exposure of data as web services.
• Row level and column level data security
• Multi tenancy data security.
• Real time data by connecting to the operational databases
• Historical data generation

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.

• Performance of TDV Studio (its own IDE) is poor.
• Performance of TDV repository database is rather poor for larger numbers of objects .(Note: We have approx. 9tsd objects introspected in TDV and approx. 20tsd objects generated in upper DV layers.)
• Propagation of privileges to parent/child dependencies does not work when applying recursively on a folder. (It's a huge setback when working with large number of objects organized semantically into subfolders.)
• Lack of command line client interface for scripting at the time of version 8.4 (I had to write my own CLI.)
• TDV Studio does an absolutely horrible job with its own code editors when indentation is in place. Also, the editor is brutally slow and feature-poor.
• Tracking privileges on the level of table/view columns causes occasional problems when regranting.
• TDV's stored programs ("SQL scripts" in their own terminology) compiler leaves out many syntactic and semantic checks, making them hugely prone to run-time errors.
• TDV Server's REST API is a very poor (in terms of features) and flawed cousin to its SOAP API (at the time of version 8.4).

Incentivized

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.

It is useful for us to see the data and do analysis. Also we use it to generate reports and see trends or gather insights

Incentivized

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

TDV's interface is a bit dated and not entirely intuitive. Would recommend some UX design review as the interface leaves a bit to be better understood to be used by users without inherent knowledge of Tibco. Overall I'd suggest more improvement here to ensure usability by a lesser tech audience.

Incentivized

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.

We have never encountered issues where it was unavailable when we needed it.

Incentivized

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.

This product's performance is very consistent. It is extremely rare for templates to fail. I've been using this software for 5 years and find it to be both simple and powerful. The impact within the company has been very positive as different processes in different areas, such as data analysis, development, and integrations, have been improved, and, best of all, it has not affected the users. Various systems with which it is connected in order to obtain information.

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.

On a few occasions I have asked TIBCO technical support for help because I have adapted perfectly to their tools, but in those few that I have communicated with their technical team I have received personalized, attentive, responsible attention and I am always assisted by an expert staff the topic. A TIBCO technical support technician spent more than an hour helping me to solve a problem in the initial stage of implementation in my department and this is something that I always appreciate.

Incentivized

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.

The training was helpful. I was able to understand how to use TIBCO for the data load process that we implemented and how to perform various troubleshooting steps based on the training I received. The technician was thorough and took the time to answer any questions. Once we were shown how to use TIBCO in the test environment, we were able to configure the production environment ourselves.

Incentivized

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

Other vendors have clearer, more visual implementation documentation. We also did not have our data architect and and server administrator available full-time for implementation. In the future, we will secure the necessary internal resources.

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.

We did not need to evaluate another technology in the same category for data virtualization, since we are 100% sure of the capabilities and benefits that we would have with TIBCO Data Virtualization, both for market positioning as well as success stories from other companies. great renown worldwide. From the first day of use, it meets our needs to provide the expected solutions.

Incentivized

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

Good scaling

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

• We took spreadsheets that took hours a month to update and made them update automatically using TDV, saving hours a month of analyst time
• The incremental cost of TDV relative to straight spotfire licensing made it a no-brainer due to the ease of data management
• We continue to automate legacy business processes in TDV, saving time all over the organization.

Incentivized