Sigma Computing Puts Business Teams in the Analytics Driver’s Seat With New “Sigma Workbooks”

By AIT News Desk On Jun 1, 2021

Sigma Computing Workbooks Delivers Iterative Analytics Experience Against Billions of Rows of Data; Company to Demo Embedded Analytics at Snowflake Summit

Sigma Computing, the cloud analytics and business intelligence innovator, has combined the ease of spreadsheets with charts and data narratives in a single collaborative canvas purpose-built for business teams with the launch of Sigma Workbooks today. Sigma Workbooks accelerates data-driven decisions by putting the power of analytics across billions of rows of live data directly into the hands of marketers, analysts, product managers, and other cross-functional business team members. The easy-to-use collaborative canvas enables everyone to find answers to critical questions in seconds, iterate and interact on analyses, share narratives in one unified place, and make data-driven decisions.

“With the accelerated cloud adoption over the past year, a digital transformation is critical to ensure that the data analytics stack satisfies the analytic needs of today and tomorrow”

The company will have a virtual booth at Snowflake Summit next week and will be joined by customer, Agero, to lead a session on best practices for building a client-facing embedded analytics application powered by Snowflake and Sigma. Agero depends on Sigma for fast, easy access to data for its roadside assistance solutions.

“Sigma Workbooks has supercharged our ability to analyze millions of rows of live data,” said Agero Senior Director of Data Science and Analytics Michael Bell. “We began using Sigma almost two years ago and were immediately impressed with how quickly authorized teams throughout the company were able to pick up Sigma and use it to find what they needed, when they needed, without much or any help from the BI team. Sigma helped us finally eliminate the BI bottleneck that had been holding Agero back and enabled us to achieve the data-driven, self-service culture we’ve been striving for while adhering to the governance constraints our clients needed. Sigma Workbooks improves on an already great cloud-scale spreadsheet experience and has introduced a new level of agility to both our analytics and decision-making.”

With the addition of Workbooks, Sigma now delivers:

A unified collaborative canvas combines spreadsheets, charts, and narratives, keeping all data projects synchronized in a single, self-contained Sigma Workbook and enabling easy collaboration across the business.
A cloud-scale spreadsheet interface for iterative data analysis, empowering cross-functional teams to conduct ad hoc analytics so they are no longer dependent upon the BI team for answers to their questions.
A highly responsive user experience, enabling knowledge workers to calculate data and find answers in milliseconds.
The ability to drill into data anywhere on a dashboard and calculate anything against billions of rows of live data using spreadsheet skills and formulas, enabling flexible, in-depth analysis down to the most granular level of detail whenever needed.
The option to embed a Workbook and make the power of Sigma available to all authorized users.

“With the accelerated cloud adoption over the past year, a digital transformation is critical to ensure that the data analytics stack satisfies the analytic needs of today and tomorrow,” said Snowflake Senior Vice President of Product Christian Kleinerman. “Like Snowflake, Sigma was built in the cloud, which allows it to take full advantage of the Snowflake Data Cloud’s scalability, compute power, and security.”

The breadth and flexibility of Sigma Workbooks supports any analysis that can be done in a spreadsheet and more, but with the power and security of a direct connection to the cloud data warehouse. Sigma Workbooks helps users understand the past, make real-time decisions, and model the future by supporting the following use cases and more:

Root Cause Analysis;
Cohort Analysis;
Customer Journey 360;
Supply Chain Optimization;
Market Basket Optimization;
Customer Issue Resolution;
Scenario Modeling;
What-if Analysis;
Forecasting.

“Sigma Computing has solved the data access versus control conundrum that IT and data teams have been grappling with for years,” said Sigma Computing Co-founder and CTO Rob Woollen. “With a data exploration and analytics interface that is similar to a spreadsheet, Sigma Workbooks meets knowledge workers, like operations, finance, and marketing teams, where they are when it comes to analytical skills and empowers them to find the answers they need to make decisions quickly. Sigma Workbooks also gives some much needed time back to data and BI teams so they can focus on larger initiatives, curating data sets, and supporting the data needs of business teams behind the scenes.”

Sigma Workbooks elevates corporate competitiveness by empowering cross-functional teams with direct access to live data, the ability to apply their domain expertise to analyses, and find the answers they need to make better, faster decisions. Across industries and domains, knowledge workers need to make time-sensitive decisions but lack access to the data needed to make them. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for access to granular data at scale, but knowledge workers are generally limited to the 50,000-foot view and weeks-long wait times of traditional BI tools. This antiquated BI workflow, which was established well before the advent of cloud data warehouses, is far too slow and rigid to meet the needs of today’s dynamic global marketplace. To fully realize the analytics potential of cloud data warehouses, businesses must up their game in terms of scale, speed, and data access to a wider profile within their organizations.

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“The most successful companies in 2020 were the ones that could quickly pivot using data-backed decisions,” said ESG Senior Analyst Mike Leone. “Achieving that level of agility requires knowledge workers having access to high-quality data as well as the ability to ask questions and find answers. Deploying solutions, like Sigma, that enable business teams to leverage self-service analytics will continue to separate data-driven businesses from the competition.”

Sigma Computing VP of UX, Design, and Research Julie Lemieux and Bell will lead a presentation at Snowflake Summit on June 8 at 11:45 a.m. PT entitled, “Zero to 60: Building Embedded Analytics Applications Powered by Snowflake and Sigma.” In this session, Bell will share the Embedded Analytics development process that put Agero in the fast lane to improving service performance and increasing revenue. Lemieux and Bell will discuss tips for migrating a client-facing Embedded Analytics application to Sigma along with best practices that will fast-track the deployment process, and a demo of just how quick and easy Embedded Analytics can be with Sigma and Snowflake.