Democratizing Data: From a Non-Data/Engineering Perspective
September 24, 2019

Democratizing Data: From a Non-Data/Engineering Perspective

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing

We are beginning to implement it across the organization as a way to democratize access to data. Decentralize the access so that it's not just within the data/engineering team and so that it's accessible and workable for other departments like sales and marketing management to use as a way to power informed decisions as well as identify key insights.
  • Clean UI makes the powerful system approachable and inviting to begin sandbox testing.
  • Modular approach. You can pivot and pull and plug away so much. The permutations are endless with lots of visualizations and integrations to keep the data and insights flowing.
  • Great for multi-user and getting people set-up across the org.
  • Though the tutorial click through at initial sign-up is done great, I wish there were some additional ways to learn about the product at the early stages. It's almost as if they begin with lots of help and support and then expect you to be great on your own and help becomes overly technical. Probably not bad for data scientists but definitely affected the want to use the tool daily (it kind of plateaued).
  • I'd like to see better sales material/education. My org has lots of people familiar with Mode & Tableau, so we wanted to have clearer comparisons of why it's worth switching over to this new tool. Why is it so much better? That needs to be clearer.
  • Been slow to get traction in organization which means ROI so far is low, however it's a long game for implementation of systems. Because we are rapidly growing finding solutions that fit us at a particular time while we are a particular size of company with specific needs is really tough. Thus it's a blend of Sigma + my company that makes the ROI challenging to gauge. I think in the right situation this would be the perfect tool that people outside of the engineering team would see as a god send.
  • Cost of changing over to Sigma is relatively low, but because we are a lean organization it has taken some significant hours from the engineering team to get connections laid out on the data side. This means opportunity cost. Make sure this is endeavor you're willing to support and able to commit the hours to (as well as prioritize) otherwise you will see it flop.
Easy to use once everthing is set up. Great UI, lots of capabilities and features (everything you expect of the industry leaders and more - probably better sharing and geo-based visualization capabilities). There's not too much to complain about with this program. I think most people would be pleased to implement this tool.
To be honest, we haven't had to utilize support a lot. Most things are self-explanatory or easily discovered online. So from the marketing side, we have had no reason to contact support. That said, our engineering team who is responsible for the solution seems to be happy about the overall package/user experience with Sigma so I'm inclined to rate them highly. Also, if you don't have need to contact support - then they're probably doing something right!
Yes absolutely! Not needing to be a SQL whiz was basically why we chose to implement Sigma. We want to democratize data, access to viewing, pivoting, visualizing, etc. Not needing to code means that Sales, Marketing, and Operations can all access the same tool comfortably and glean the information they need.
We are still in the early stages of getting everything flowing regularly and effortlessly in Sigma. Thus, the sharing capability is not something I have much insight into and am not ready to share unfounded feedback on. However, the built-in capabilities will hopefully get us off of our dependency on Slack and using the real sharing/collaboration tools that we need to.
Incredible! Rapid access to massive data is CRITICAL to our business. We have large volumes of fast-paced, ever updating transactional data. In Freight Tech having access to dynamic and massive data is the crux upon which we succeed or fail. Sigma Computing definitely offers and exceeds expectations for this particular turnaround.
Ok, the pricing model is so smart. It empowers the people that need to be head deep in the data to do their job well while providing transparency to the broader organization. If we had to pay for 'view' licenses differently that would be an issue. We see this happen with other pricing models where you essentially pay for stagnate or never used licenses but can't afford to cut those folks off because access to the data is technically critical to them doing their job.
Against Tableau: the biggest 2 factors that make Sigma a better or easier tool is geo-based visualizations & sharing/reporting transparency (+easiness)

Against Access: There's not much to be said, Sigma's offering is worlds apart from Access. BUT at my previous work (where we only worked with approved enterprise systems) the relatively new and unknown Sigma would not have made the cut. Thus Access, from the familiarity/clout of being a Microsoft product was the winner there.
Great for smaller businesses and tech startups to get the data stood up and democratized across an organization. Lower cost of getting started and easy to get it going.

Sigma Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
10
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
3
Publish to Web
6
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
3
Report Delivery Scheduling
3
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated