SiSense is now offering its Prism "big data" analytics software for Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform, expanding beyond the Amazon Web Services platform that SiSense currently relies on.
The move will help SiSense attract new customers who are closely tied to the Microsoft environment, said Bruno Aziza, the company's marketing vice president, in an interview.
SiSense's business analytics applications, which have been on the market for about 18 months, can run either on-premise or in the cloud. The company operates on a subscription model with customers paying a monthly fee based on data capacity.
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Aziza said support for Azure, combined with Prism's ability to work on-premise, gives businesses flexibility in terms of whether they store data in the cloud or on-site. It also allows businesses to easily shift data analysis operations from the cloud back on-premise should they decide to do so.
"Big data analytics is too complicated," said Amit Bendov, SiSense CEO, in a statement touting that flexibility. "Customers have to buy dedicated hardware and hire technical teams to configure and administer their infrastructure. It can take months before users can draw value from their data."
The Prism software is integrated with about 80 percent of the world's data sources, according to Aziza: A critical point given that many customers operate with between six and eight data sources, he estimated. It supports automatic data extraction from all major databases -- including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Intuit QuickBase -- and applications like Salesforce.com, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, Zendesk and Intuit QuickBooks, and data from Hadoop/Hive.
PUBLISHED JAN. 30, 2013
