Go Cloud! – Sisense Success Story

Sisense‘s solution analyzes the most sensitive information in the world’s largest companies. It was clear that MoovingON would be the one to maintain Sisense’s cloud service.

Since its inception in 2010, Sisense has become a leader in enterprise information analytics through an information analytics system that can analyze information from any source, including complex information, and allow employees in the organization to analyze it clearly, even without technical knowledge. The Sisense system can start displaying data in days or weeks, instead of months of implementation like other solutions. Once it’s working, people like DBA are no longer needed to perform information analytics. Regular users can also analyze the information, detect activity patterns and data anomalies, and set up dashboards that center useful information on an ongoing basis, without having to have an on-site analyst and without spending a lot of time analyzing information using the old tools. Sisense customers include companies such as Rolls Royce, Air Canada, Philips, General Electric, Motorola, Verizon, and more.

Unlike other companies today that are starting with cloud services, Sisense has only sold its solution for local installation on customers’ infrastructure, who preferred not to transfer their information to cloud services. Only in recent years has the demand from customers increased and Sisense decided to offer the possibility of receiving the product also through the cloud.

“First of all, we looked at where we want to place our servers,” explains Shimon Zeldner, Director of Cloud Services and Operations at Sisense, “and the choice fell on AWS cloud services. Thereafter, the services had to be monitored 24/7.”

Local or global, that is the question

Like many other companies, Sisense also debated between a local network operating center (NOC) and an external service provider. In many cases, companies that set up an internal operation center assign ongoing tasks that are not related to monitoring and service control because ‘they are there anyway’.

At Sisense, the level of customer service was the most important thing, and they decided to invest in an external service provider that continuously monitors the services without incorporating additional occupations. “We really believe in focus,” says Zeldner, “and since the company did not have that experience to date, we chose MoovingON’s service.”

Sisense conducted a lengthy process of examining companies in the field, both in Israel and abroad. Overseas service providers were let go very early. Service providers in countries such as the US and Europe offer good services but at a much higher price level than Israel, and suppliers in the East offer lower-cost service but the level of service is low as well. Sisense conducted a survey of service providers in the country and chose MoovingON because of their extensive experience and professional knowledge of AWS services. “We really needed to gain experience while building the service, so it was imperative for us to find an easily accessible local partner, that holds the knowledge and experience focused on setting up a network operating center, and not as an additional service as some of the IT services they offer,” says Zeldner. Apparently, when Sisense wanted to visit the operation centers of a few service providers, they were turned down with the excuse that it was “in the process of being set up” or that “right now we are buying screens”, whereas MoovingON maintains an advanced operation center operating since the company was founded so Sisense could easily receive an impression of its round the clock operations.

In the first phase, scoping was done by MoovingON’s experts, who analyzed Sisense’s needs and requirements and defined the metrics to work with. The work included collaboration with IT teams, support teams, and cloud operations teams, and together the goals were set for monitoring. Then, a secure connection between Sisense’s environment and MoovingON’s operation center was established. In the final phase, the runbook was written, including details of cases and responses according to Sisense’s requirements. For example, what process to follow if a server crashes or when a cluster is down. Maintaining the runbook on an ongoing basis, ensured that at every stage the knowledge remains with Sisense and the company can use it to improve its processes as well.

Zeldner says that today, the level of collaboration is such that MoovingON’s CloudOps management platform system (MoovingON.ai) directly opens tickets in Sisense’s internal support system, where Sisense teams can handle it directly and the entire process is transparent to both parties so that troubleshooting time can be accelerated.

Looking ahead

“Sisense’s product is unique in that it allows full freedom of action for the user in analyzing their information. This is our basic principle,” says Zeldner. When it comes to an on-premise installed product, the customer is aware of the system’s requirements and adapts accordingly. When it comes to cloud service, the solution can be “challenged” with edge cases of unpredicted databases that needed to be analyzed, where the amount of data can be very large, or the database structure is very complex. Ultimately, this pressure creates varying requirements from the servers when it is not just a “server up or down”. The availability of the services must also be ensured quickly, in order to maintain the experience of the end customer who expects rapid and efficient information analysis. “It’s definitely a challenge from Sisense and certainly a challenge to MoovingON that must provide advanced and accurate service control to the level of user queries,” says Zeldner.

“Sisense is definitely an exceptional customer,” says Avi Shalisman, MoovingON’s CEO. “Over the past two years, we’ve grown together from a few individual customers to more than a hundred, which required quite a few adjustments and changes along the way.” One of the benefits of MoovingON is the fact that the company has ISO27001 certification, which has certainly helped Sisense in the process of moving to the cloud with customers, as this is a service that requires critical availability in many organizations. “Our relationship is growing and developing, and we have created trusting relationships that allow us to constantly improve our work and bring more value to our customers,” Shalisman concludes.