Sisense is a company that embeds analytics seamlessly into any workflow. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Sisense chief product officer Ayala Michelson to learn more about the company.
Ayala Michelson’s Background
Michelson’s professional career started at BMC Software as an Engineering Team Leader. And Michelson said:
“I led the company’s efforts to help customers run and reinvent their businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems. Over the past 12 years, I have held multiple product, growth, and strategy leadership roles in various B2B and B2C companies. I was the head of product at Perion and VP of Product at Similarweb. I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial background and built my own venture in the Fashion tech space, Showroom. Showroom was an AI-powered marketplace for personal styling and buying experience, bringing together innovation, technology, and community.”
“Most recently, I served as Executive Vice President of Product and Analytics at Gloat, an agile workforce operating system. At Gloat, I spearheaded the launch of Gloat Talent Marketplace, a new product category, and helped the company introduce new Data and Analytics product lines. I have an MBA in Finance and Marketing from Tel Aviv University and a B.S.C in Computer Science and Math from Bar-Ilan University.”
“At Sisense, I oversee product engineering, product management, and product marketing. We place an emphasis on accelerating innovation for product and development teams by equipping them with the tools they need to flexibly and efficiently embed insights and analytics into their products and platforms.”
“I have always considered myself as a builder and a creator. I have been fortunate enough to spend my entire career doing what I love the most: building products that make a true impact and bring innovation to life. Sisense is in such a unique position to build platforms for the creators, which makes it all the more exciting for me to lead our product strategy and growth.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Michelson’s favorite memory working for Sisense so far? Michelson reflected:
“As the Executive VP of Product and Analytics at Gloat, I was actually a Sisense customer and saw the remarkable impact and potential of the Sisense platform. I was able to build data products and bring insights and analytics into the hands of my customers in no time. This really allowed my development team to move faster and build products for scale. I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to lead the Sisense product organization, and since I joined, it’s been even better than I had imagined. The depth of technology here is amazing; Sisense engineers’ expertise in analytics, big data ML, and Gen AI is an incredible differentiator.”
“But what I admire most about Sisense is the people we have here: The culture, passion, motivation, collaboration, and energy are unlike anything I’ve experienced before, and inspire me to build products that truly transform the embedded analytics space.”
Core Products
What are Sisense’s core products and features? Michelson explained:
“Sisense is an embedded analytics platform provider that empowers thousands of companies to build and embed analytics into data products. We accelerate innovation by providing product and development teams with a complete embedded analytics platform to build data products with insights that drive action and growth. Composed of Sisense Fusion Embed, Sisense Cloud, and Compose SDK, Sisense’s flexible analytics platform has 21 patents to date and enables customers like ZoomInfo, Nasdaq, and Air Canada to infuse actionable insights into their customer experiences.”
Bottlenecks In The Industry
Has Michelson faced any specific bottlenecks in her sector of work recently? Michelson acknowledged:
“Sisense was born with BI – when companies needed a way to bring their siloed data together to understand their own business. That was over 15 years ago. Today, Sisense focuses on empowering product teams to create insights from customers and third-party data and embed them into their products. Sisense’s vision has been diverging from the BI market for years, but the embedded analytics category is still a sub-market to the ABI market. However, in actuality, we are playing in an entirely different space, and this is creating some friction and misunderstanding in the market.”
“Another bottleneck is this: The world has shifted from a data-first strategy to AI-first experiences, based on a foundation of large data as its component. On the heels of Gen AI and LLM disruptions, what can now be achieved with data can be completely reimagined. New technologies are arising, and every company in the world is sprinting to build AI-first data strategies and experiences. Leading companies that have already implemented this shift are accelerating their innovation cycles and are already ahead. But things are not as simple as they seem: With all eyes on Gen AI, most companies still struggle to adopt AI-first experiences and haven’t yet bridged the gap that would allow them to rely on data, insights, and analytics that are deployable and deliverable at scale and integrated in the context and flow of applications and business workflows. We are seeing a bit of the-cart-before-the-horse situation, and that rarely plays out well long-term.”
Evolution Of Sisense
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Michelson noted:
“At Sisense, we’ve been a leader in embedded analytics for over 15 years. We’re now evolving into a new developer-first era for Sisense, all while maintaining our existing low and no-code capabilities. We’re committed to this evolutionary journey and plan rapid advancements in our offerings in the coming months. To ensure we meet the needs of a diverse range of analytics builders, we’re prepared to support the full spectrum—from no-code enthusiasts to seasoned developers, from bespoke internal apps to the most demanding customer-facing apps—thereby maintaining our leadership in the ever-changing landscape of embedded analytics within modern apps.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Michelson cited:
“We recently unveiled the public preview of ComposeSDK for Fusion, a flexible developer toolkit that allows developers to embed analytics and create insights-driven experiences in a code-first, scalable, and modular way. This product marks the beginning of a new, developer-first era for Sisense, with more developer-centric offers coming in 2024.”
“Last month, we earned a new privacy certificate (ISO 27701 Certificate for PII Processors). This achievement marks a significant milestone in Sisense’s long journey of safeguarding customer’s personal information. Security of our customers’ data is one of our core values at Sisense, and we’re constantly working to deliver products that are at the forefront of our industry. We also know that data security and privacy is becoming an increasingly important concern for our customers. By receiving ISO 27701, Sisense is able to demonstrate that it has the essential safeguards in place to reduce critical data risks.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Michelson about customer success stories, he highlighted:
— Hive, the #1 productivity platform for fast-moving teams, initially faced limitations in creating an embedded analytics solution seamlessly integrated into their product. However, Compose SDK transformed their approach. With it, Hive empowered their end-users to become builders of critical widgets and dashboards, eliminating the constraints of pre-built widgets. This shift allowed Hive’s team to concentrate on refining data models rather than being restricted by dashboard design. Compose SDK’s high-quality native components and comprehensive documentation gave users more control. Hive noted the developer-friendly aspect of Compose SDK, designed with modern, high-quality tools that have made the development process a joyful experience for Hive’s team.
— ZoomInfo, the trusted go-to-market platform for businesses to find, acquire, and grow their customers, needed to enhance its customer experience with precise analytics integration, design alignment, and efficient performance. They chose Sisense’s embedded analytics platform for pixel-perfect control, scalability, and developer-friendly tools. This decision led to improved customer satisfaction, streamlined delivery, and an enhanced user experience. Sisense empowered ZoomInfo to meet tight deadlines and provide valuable insights to their customers, ultimately driving growth and retention.
Funding/Revenue
After asking Michelson about the company’s funding and revenue information, she revealed:
“Sisense hit significant financial milestones in 2023, including achieving profitability, setting us apart from many startups in terms of both EBITDA and cash flow. Sisense is well-capitalized and is not looking at any further capitalized raises at this time.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Michelson assessed:
“Sisense boasts a robust history in the data analytics market, which has seen remarkable growth and evolution over the past decade. In 2023, Sisense embarked on a strategic shift, aligning its focus with the vast and dynamic global developer community as a central pillar of its Total Addressable Market (TAM).”
“According to Gartner, businesses will prioritize modular applications that deliver their functionality as API/event-first business components to support the accelerating pace of innovation and change. They predict that by 2025, 60% of new SaaS designs will support both UI-first and API-first access, making preparedness for composability a common cloud application trait and that 60% of the new custom business applications will be built using reusable business services via a shared curated component catalog or marketplace.”
“As the data landscape undergoes further transformation, it is our strong belief that developers will occupy a pivotal role, driving innovation and creating cutting-edge data products across a multitude of industries.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Michelson affirmed:
“Unlike for the majority of our competitors, embedded analytics isn’t a satellite feature or afterthought for us: it’s the core of what we do. Many BI vendors offer ’embedding,’ but this is often a later—and limited—add-on. Sisense is a completely holistic platform: by adopting low/no-code, light/limited-code, and full-code approaches, we’re uniquely positioned to serve a full spectrum of development teams—from product managers seeking a no-code embedded experience to pro developers crafting bespoke, context-aware embedded analytics experiences.”
“Our platform is also developed to support the way today’s modern applications are built: as composable applications with reusable and shareable components based on API-first platforms that can fit into development ecosystems and CI/CD processes. Our architecture is fully componentized, cloud-based, can work on the full-stack or just a part, can work as headless BI, and can fit into SDLC, CI/CD processes. We’ve built over 500 APIs, and unlike many other vendors, we built our platform as API-first and UX-second.”
“Today’s developers aren’t looking for the restricted, non-secure, monolithic iFrames or simplistic API integrations that traditional BI tools offer. They require a solution that is designed for and tailored to their needs, one that harnesses the full potential of modern technologies, including generative AI. This is why we’re extending our platform with additional, dev-first SDKs and tools. Developers can be confident in using the Sisense platform for their production products — knowing our security, compliance, data access, performance stability, and scale can fully support their enterprise-grade platforms. Customers have the freedom they want with SDK libraries built to work with the tools and frameworks they already use (React, TypeScript).”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Michelson pointed out:
“Sisense is revolutionizing the embedded analytics landscape with a pledge to empower developers across the globe. We are primed to provide developers with unrivaled capabilities to build analytics into their apps and monetize their data with full flexibility, delivering greater control and integration that aligns with their unique development practices and CI/CD pipelines. We’ll continue on this path to provide developer-first offering to build a world in which the boundaries of creativity and innovation exist on entirely new heights for developers.”
“This evolution will expand our offering to make Sisense a complete, holistic platform with no-, low-, and pro-code tools can serve the full spectrum of team needs—from less technical teams that need to quickly set up analytics to mature dev teams looking to build sophisticated data products, with context-aware analytics that deeply integrates into their apps and business workflows. We are set to unbound data from monolithic dashboards and give our customers end-users decision-making confidence through instant insights, when and where they need them.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics to discuss? Michelson concluded:
“We help developers unleash their creativity, so they can give their customers decision-making confidence through insights when and where they need them. We are excited to power their innovation and look forward to seeing where the technology takes them.”
