Israel's SiSense sees surging demand for data analytics software
By Tova Cohen
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Business intelligence software provider SiSense said it expects sales to triple in 2014, boosted by soaring demand from small- and medium-sized businesses seeking to analyze growing amounts of data.
Israel-based SiSense's software helps companies understand their data, enabling non-technical staff to connect multiple data sources and prepare professional reports.
SiSense Chief Executive Amit Bendov said a number of trends are driving this $20 billion a year market. The volume of data is outgrowing the capabilities of existing software and companies are increasingly demanding that employees have facts and data from various sources at their fingertips during meetings and when making decisions.
"Our sales growth tripled three years in a row and will continue to triple this year," Bendov said, adding that the firm's sales are in the high single-digit millions of dollars.
"Our goal is to invest every dollar we make in growth. We’ll be profitable in 2015," he told Reuters.
SiSense, which has offices in Tel Aviv and New York, plans to open an office in Silicon Valley by early next year, when it will also expand in Europe. About 70 percent of its sales are in the United States and clients range from small firms to individual departments at eBay, Carlsberg and ESPN.
Since the 1990s, several companies have been providing business intelligence technology, including IBM's Cognos, SAP's BusinessObjects and MicroStrategy, one of the few remaining independent providers.
In the mid-2000s, companies such as Qlik Technologies and Tableau Software - which went public last year - created products using in-memory technology that were simpler and faster to run, Bendov said.
The drawback was that a computer's memory is limited in the amount of data it can process. SiSense sought to address that limitation by using data inside chips that can store more memory.
The company, which raised $10 million last year from venture capital funds Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital, says its goal is an initial public offering.
"If we continue this growth pace we’re seeing, we’ll be getting there pretty quickly," Bendov said.
(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
