Smart Building Leader Vitality Uses Sisense to Save Clients Millions
Meet Vitality
Vitality was founded by energy experts with the aim of making any building a smart building. The team at Vitality does this by aggregating and analyzing a property’s internet of things data to identify energy demand and savings, risk mitigation opportunities, and overall building health. By centralizing data from devices on meters, sprinklers, building automation systems, and more, Vitality’s building intelligence solution unifies all endpoint data in a single place. Its platform takes the guesswork out of building operations to help property managers reduce operating expenses, avoid costly damage, and optimize ROI while lowering overall energy consumption. With Sisense, Vitality supercharged its offering, saving clients millions of dollars.
Vitality’s challenge: Embed analytics to evolve into an enterprise-level product
As the world grapples with the climate crisis and changing weather patterns, platforms like Vitality will only become more important and useful to building teams of all kinds. Vitality knows firsthand: Its original plan saw its product team building basic analytics into the platform, but customer demands around analytics expanded with growth, quickly outpacing what Vitality could build in-house. Vitality knew it had to buy analytics capabilities to stay relevant to its customers and that these capabilities would need to be seamlessly integrated into its proprietary platform, perfectly matching the look and feel of its software and delivering an industry-leading user experience for customers. Beyond that, the organization recognized huge future growth potential by augmenting its powerful algorithms with industry-leading embedded analytics bought from Sisense.
“Our core strength is algorithms,” says Clayton Erekson, Vitality CEO. “We hadn’t put resources and development behind data visualizations. I’m guessing we would have spent millions of dollars trying to build it ourselves.”
The benefits of buying Sisense for embedded analytics
To meet customer needs, retain existing clients, and help the company grow into its next phase, Vitality needed a technology partner that would help it meet the expectations its customers have for analytics capabilities. Sisense provided the Vitality product team with a more efficient and cost effective alternative to building, one it could easily embed into its core product and customize for similar look and feel, and which got it to market much faster than if it had tried to build it from scratch. It also enabled the team to quickly add value with pre-built features and open-source APIs that integrated seamlessly with the existing products. This allowed the Vitality team to remain focused on its own expertise: algorithms, measurement, and verification.
Embedded analytics by Sisense were integral to making Vitality’s platform enterprise-grade, empowering it to start winning big in new markets. Working with one of the nation’s largest retailers, the new Vitality building intelligence platform already has a strong track record of detecting leaks in facilities, preventing stock spoilage, and saving the client millions.
“Our client was losing somewhere between $30 and $70 million a year in inventory due to water leaks,” Clayton said. “They’ve contracted us to not only help them manage their data, but specifically to identify water leaks. We’ve installed our system in three stores now, and we are three for three in identifying water leaks for them before damage is done.”
With Sisense on board, Vitality was able to solve its three biggest challenges:
Challenge 1: Unlock next-level intelligence from disparate sources
Vitality had built some basic analytics into its platform, but aggregating complex data drawn from disparate locations and presenting actionable intelligence from it in a consumable way would have taken an immense amount of time, energy, and resources.
“The problems our whole business was founded originally to solve require data from buildings that is very fragmented and segregated,” said Clayton. “We’re trying to bring it all into one place and tie it into a holistic view.”
Sisense gives Vitality the ability to connect to any data source in any location, clean and prep the data, and then analyze it using custom algorithms. Once actionable intelligence has been derived from this rich storehouse of combined data, Sisense effortlessly surfaces that intelligence into the Vitality platform and directly into the hands of the users who need it most, infused right into their daily workflows.
Challenge 2: Perfectly match the look and feel of its software
Vitality instantly recognized the value of Sisense’s white-labeling capabilities: ultimate flexibility and the tools to make custom analytics that perform at scale and match the brand’s look and feel, giving customers a consistent user experience.
“We really knew we were on the right track with Sisense when we realized that we could brand it and make it look and feel like it’s part of Vitality. Our clients don’t know that it’s Sisense,” said Clayton. “We wanted to create a seamless good client experience for the end user, which we can do with Sisense.”
Challenge 3: Deliver enterprise-grade analytics, securely
The proprietary algorithms Vitality makes to surface important info about building climates and energy usage are the key differentiator, its “secret sauce.” The Sisense deployment allows the organization to serve up enterprise-grade analytics while maintaining full control of the company’s intellectual property.
“The fact that Sisense doesn’t even see my data is fantastic,” Clayton said. “It helps mitigate security and privacy compliance concerns that our customers have. Customers often ask security questions about what we do with the data, who we share it with. With Sisense, I never need to say that I’m sharing it with anyone because I’m not!”
Building tomorrow’s analytics with Sisense
Better analytics were the key to evolving Vitality’s product and helping it land large enterprise clients. Buying Sisense analytics rather than building its own solution saved the Vitality team millions of dollars and allowed it to begin working toward ROI immediately. It also gave Vitality’s R&D team the unexpected benefit of being able to test new features before rolling them out to customers.
“We’re able to test features in Sisense before we actually develop them.” Clayton says. “It creates a playground for us. My chief product officer spends a lot of time in Sisense when we are working on a new feature.”
When it comes to facilities management, COVID-19 has changed everything. Building owners of all kinds are more concerned than ever with air quality and other facets of environmental control and energy usage, so Vitality’s market opportunity is huge. And with embedded analytics by Sisense, it’s ready.
