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April 20, 2021

Smart Building Technology Made Smarter with Data; Businesses Prepare for Office Reopenings by Leveraging Cloud Analytics with Sigma

SAN FRANCISCO — April 20, 2021 — Sigma Computing, an innovator in cloud analytics and business intelligence, is helping Metrikus fulfill its mission to make offices safer, healthier and more productive places to work. The smart building technology provider collects data from building systems and hundreds of sensors that measure occupancy and air quality. Since deploying Sigma, Metrikus has accelerated decision making, increased operational efficiency by 25 percent, and improved the customer experience with faster custom reporting. Metrikus also leveraged Sigma to create a COVID-19 Occupancy Index to track office space usage over time. Data from the Occupancy Index is currently featured on Bloomberg's ticker and garnered local press coverage. “Sigma transforms data into the organization-wide asset every company wants it to be,” said Sam Hall, Head of Technology, Metrikus. “Before Sigma, data was a barrier. Every time a customer had a request that was outside the scale and scope of our own platform, engineering had to get involved, which took time away from developing our technology. Sigma makes time and technical expertise non-issues so our business teams are now able to address custom report requests without my help and find all the information they need to make data-driven decisions on the fly.”

With Sigma, the Operations, Finance, Sales, and Marketing teams now all have direct access to governed data in Snowflake, providing the company with a single source of truth for nearly a billion rows of data and the ability to draw a complete business performance picture across tools, including Asana, HubSpot, and QuickBooks. Business teams are able to explore data, combine sources, and conduct their own analyses with Sigma’s intuitive spreadsheet interface. The Operations team now has all sensor data in a single dashboard, allowing them to identify and remedy issues 10 times faster, and the team is able to quickly and consistently deliver complex, ad hoc reports to customers without consuming valuable engineering resources. These improvements are helping Metrikus customers accelerate office reopening plans while ensuring maximum health safety for returning employees. “IoT sensors are forecasted to create zettabytes of data in the coming years and Sigma’s ability to analyze data at this scale is unique to our offering,” said Sigma Computing CEO Mike Palmer. “Metrikus needed a solution that would not only provide a single source of truth for managing external data coming in from sensors, but also a solution for the limited visibility into business performance. Sigma is unique in its ability to make data an organization-wide asset because it provides a communal environment where business teams, analysts, and the data team can collaborate on analyses and quickly find answers to their questions.”

Metrikus’ building systems and sensors measure air quality and building occupancy, putting the company in a unique position to report on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Sigma’s Embedded Analytics functionality, the marketing and engineering teams worked together to create a public Occupancy Index dashboard that illustrates how office space occupancy in the UK is changing over time in response to evolving government regulations. In addition to Bloomberg, the Occupancy Index was also picked up by The Telegraph among other publications and led to a 41 percent increase in website traffic.Prior to implementing Sigma, Metrikus’ Operations team had limited visibility across business units due to data silos, preventing the team from seeing a clear and accurate representation of what was happening through the sales funnel and across the business. The Operations team also had to manually monitor sensor data to ensure products were functioning properly and had to rely on engineers to fulfill ad hoc requests from customers because they had no way to access or analyze the data independently. This made it difficult for Metrikus to provide optimal service to customers and borrowing engineering resources hindered innovation. Read the complete Metrikus case study to learn about additional outcomes the company has achieved since empowering everyone in the organization to harness the full power of their data, including:

  • 25 percent increase in the number of complex, ad hoc customer reports delivered;
  • 10 percent increase in revenue potential;
  • 50 percent query optimization.