Why Modern Businesses are Transitioning to Sigma for Custom Data Tool Solutions
Successful businesses recognize the critical role of data in driving success. However, many still rely on internally developed data tools that often become a burden due to high maintenance costs, scalability limitations, and rapid obsolescence. These challenges can hinder innovation and revenue generation, slow down decision-making, and even increase security risks. This post will explore how Sigma, a modern cloud-native data analytics platform, can overcome these limitations and empower organizations to unlock the full value of their data – think of it like starting with a robust framework rather than from scratch.
Five Reasons Why Switching to Sigma Can Benefit Your Organization
1. Faster Time to Value
Sigma delivers faster time to value by putting powerful data tools directly in the hands of business users. Sigma Data Apps support cross-functional collaboration by combining pre-built templates, live cloud connectivity, and an intuitive interface that feels familiar to anyone who has used a spreadsheet.
Unlike custom internal tools that are often built for a small group of technical users, Sigma Data Apps are designed for scale. The interface draws inspiration from tools like Excel, lowering the barrier to entry for non-technical users. That familiarity makes it easier for business teams to explore live data, automate recurring reports, and contribute to decision-making alongside data teams.
Beyond individual exploration, Sigma fosters real-time collaboration. Teams can co-build, share, and comment on data projects in one place, eliminating version control issues and breaking down knowledge silos. This kind of collaborative environment opens the door to true data democratization, where more people can ask better questions, spot opportunities, and act on insights faster.
2. Agility and Adaptability
Sigma’s cloud-native architecture positions it as highly adaptable in the fast-paced, fast-changing tech landscape. Sigma is not simply reacting to changes; it is actively shaping the future of data analytics by pioneering a new standard of proactive updates and seamless adaptability. This allows you to focus on strategic initiatives instead of technical maintenance. The agility Sigma provides directly translates to business value by ensuring data tools are always current, maximizing ROI, and minimizing disruption to operations. This means teams can focus on driving innovation and delivering value to customers, rather than spending time on maintenance tasks.
Even better, Sigma’s agile development and deployment model eliminates the need for costly and disruptive upgrades or updates that can take your team offline and impact productivity. It’s always updated to the latest version, with new features and improvements being integrated for both customers and teams managing the tool.
This is all achieved through:
- Cloud-Native Foundation: Leveraging the inherent scalability and flexibility of the cloud
- Microservices Architecture: Enabling independent deployment and updates of individual components
- Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Automating the build, test, and deployment process for seamless updates
3. Seamless Scalability
If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that data volume and needs will continue to grow, especially if a company is gaining new customers and retaining existing customers. Sigma has been purpose-built to handle massive billion and trillion row datasets, highly complex queries, and high user concurrency with little to no performance degradation.
It does this through a cloud-native architecture that leverages distributed computing principles. Essentially, Sigma distributes data and processing across a cluster of servers. Because of that, queries can be executed in parallel, significantly accelerating query speeds and improving overall performance. This distributed approach also provides inherent redundancy and fault tolerance for high availability and resilience.
4. Better Security
Sigma prioritizes security and compliance by adhering to industry best practices like HIPAA and GDPR and maintaining robust certifications. This significantly reduces the risk of security vulnerabilities and data breaches compared to maintaining an internally developed tool, which can be challenging to keep secure and compliant with evolving and sometimes complex regulations across industries, countries, and companies.
5. Powerful Embedding Capabilities
Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of Sigma is its embedding capabilities. Unlike many internal data tools, Sigma can seamlessly embed into customer-facing applications, transforming a data product into a powerful data-driven solution. This allows organizations to offer embedded analytics as a premium feature, creating new revenue streams and increasing customer value. Sigma's full branding/white-labeling for customer login sites also enables seamless integration.
Real World Benefits of Sigma Implementations
Our clients have been transitioning to Sigma rapidly. Let’s explore two recent case studies:
Reducing Overhead by $1,000,000
One of our clients, a large convenience store transactions and fuel data provider, acquired a company that developed an in-house data analytics tool for CPG & retail customers. It provides the ability to combine client-provided data with customer input data, create more powerful insights, and output tabular data for export and further analysis. Unfortunately, the tool has become antiquated and difficult to maintain over the nearly 20 years it’s been in production. Basic queries take nearly a minute to run at times, and large or complex queries with billion row datasets take much longer, the UI lacks responsiveness and isn’t intuitive for many business users, new features and enhancements are slow to roll out, and maintenance overhead is astronomical. To further compound issues, knowledge of the tool is isolated to small teams which makes effective management difficult.
Now that they’ve evaluated and selected Sigma as the replacement, the client will reduce overhead & maintenance costs by an estimated $1,000,000/year. Additionally, they’ll have the ability to monetize their new tool in several ways for greater revenue capture through things like premium user accounts, basic reader accounts, and other features like input tables for customer data use that drive better data integration and analysis.
Enhancing the Customer Experience and Overall Management
Another client was in a similar situation in regard to poor customer experience with a custom-built in-house tool and high ongoing maintenance costs. A major provider of agricultural and animal health data worldwide, the company has developed and acquired sophisticated data analysis tools over the past two decades. Customers can access a broad range of data and perform calculations, visualizations, and tabular data outputs for further analysis. However, feature updates for their tools were few and far between, so over time customers expressed concerns about the antiquated UI and unintuitive functionality of the tool, as well as its poor performance. This directly impacted the perceived value and put customer retention at risk.
We supported their evaluation of Sigma as a direct replacement and, leveraging our deep Sigma expertise, built out core requirements that needed to be met to mimic their internal custom-built tools' features. This was critical, as customers wanted to maintain the same “Excel-like” functionality but with better performance and a more straightforward UI. Furthermore, we provided strategic guidance and implementation support to ensure a seamless migration and effective setup. Our client also realized the significant reduction of maintenance and overhead costs with Sigma, as well as greater oversight of user data access, monetization opportunities, and extensive documentation for tool management.
Summary
In today's data-driven world, businesses heavily rely on data to make informed decisions and drive growth. While internally developed data tools may initially seem like a cost-effective solution, they often become a significant burden in the long run.
We've explored the key challenges associated with internally developed custom tools, including:
- High maintenance overhead
- Scalability limitations
- Technology obsolescence
- Limited functionality
- Security vulnerabilities
- High total cost of ownership
These challenges can significantly hinder a business's ability to innovate, adapt, and compete in today's rapidly evolving market.
Sigma offers a compelling alternative. By leveraging cloud-native architecture, continuous updates, and a scalable infrastructure, Sigma helps businesses overcome these limitations. With robust security measures, powerful embedding capabilities, and intuitive user experience, Sigma also accelerates time to insights, improves decision-making, and frees up valuable IT resources.
Are outdated, in-house tools holding your business back from its data-driven potential? Stop losing ground to competitors and explore how Sigma and Aimpoint can revolutionize your analytics. Reach out to learn more.
FAQ
Q: What is Sigma and how does it differ from traditional data tools?
A: Sigma is a cloud-native data analytics platform. Unlike traditional tools, it allows you to write data to your warehouse in Data Applications, has robust security, powerful embedding, and an intuitive, Excel-like interface.
Q: Why should I consider replacing my internally built data tools with Sigma?
A: Custom tools often lead to high maintenance costs, scalability issues, and obsolescence. Sigma offers a modern, managed platform that reduces these burdens, allowing you to focus on strategic initiatives.
Q: What is embedded analytics?
A: Embedded analytics is integrating data visualizations and reporting directly into your applications or portals, enabling users to access insights within their workflow.
Q: How difficult is the migration process from custom tools to Sigma?
A: We recognize that transitioning from familiar, custom-built tools can be a significant undertaking. Our extensive experience means we understand the intricacies involved in moving data and workflows, and we provide full support across key areas, such as:
- Evaluation & Planning (phased approach)
- Strategic Data Mapping & Transformation
- Workflow & Dashboard Migration
- Implementation
- Post-Migration Support
Q: How can I learn more about Sigma and see if it's right for my business?
A: Reach out to us for a demo and consultation. We'll help you evaluate your needs and determine how Sigma can transform your data analytics.
