Elad Israeli

America is a patriotic nation. Notwithstanding the definite upsurge in the period following 9/11/2001 ten years ago, overall the level of American patriotism tends to remain remarkably consistent. Polls support this statement, as reported in a Forbes article last year: Patriotic attitudes are generally very stable. In a question Gallup asked in January 2001, 87% said they were "extremely" or "very" proud to be American. When Pew repeated the identical question last year, 86% gave that response. In 2001 and 2009, only 1% said they were "not at all proud." The 9/11 tragedy produced more overt displays of patriotism and heightened sentiment, but responses soon returned to the norm. So how did 9/11 impact American patriotism? Back in 2005, an MSNBC article reported the results of a poll conducted by the Roper Reports unit of NOP World. NOP’s vice president of consumer tr... (more)

Putting the Costs of Business Intelligence in Perspective

Successful business intelligence (BI) solutions serve as many business users as possible.  As more users use it, the more value the solution brings. However, if you’ve had any experience with BI, you must have noticed that as the number of users grow – so does the complexity (and consequent cost) of the solution. This is a fundamental reality in the traditional business intelligence space, although many startups in the space are attempting to change it – each according to their own vision and understanding of the space. But why is buying a BI solution for dozens or hundreds of us... (more)

Crispin Read Joins SiSense as Executive Chairman

SiSense, a provider of leading-edge business intelligence (BI) solutions, has announced that Crispin Read has joined the board of directors of SiSense as Executive Chairman, effective immediately. “We are delighted to welcome Crispin as Executive Chairman,” says Elad Israeli, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SiSense. “Crispin’s experience and track record at Business Objects, Cartesis and Microsoft, give him the perfect background to support SiSense as we continue to execute our ambitious global growth strategy.” With over 20 years of experience in business intelligence ... (more)

Business Intelligence vs. Big Data

I was recently fortunate to speak at one of the database technology conferences held in Israel. Big parts of this conference revolved around ‘Big Data’ and I was asked to give the Business Intelligence perspective on this fascinating subject. As part of my presentation, I attempted to show the impact of columnar database technology on the basic premise of business intelligence - the ability to have business users perform ad-hoc analytics and reporting tasks over as much data as possible. In order to do that, I represented a business user building a report over a very large opera... (more)

Columnar RDBMS, Gourmet Fast Food and Santa Claus

Boris Evelson of Forrester recently published a blog post titled It's The Dawning Of The Age Of BI DBMS (Database Management System). I took note that in this post he classified Vertica, ParAccel and Sybase IQ in a category he named ‘Columnar RDBMS (Relational DBMS)’, and that started off a friendly email exchange as to what the heck that really means. I said: “RDBMS is tabular, by definition.” ...and Boris said: “To me if I can access something via SQL, it’s relational.” Who’s right is a matter of perspective, I suppose. But technically, defining RDBMS by the existence of SQL a... (more)