Panorama Business Intelligence

We just recently released NovaView 6.2 that includes NovaView for Office 2010/SharePoint 2010 (including PowerPivot), and we’re happy to share the latest product review in SQL Server Magazine. It was written by Derek Comingore, Microsoft SQL Server MVP (Most Valued Professional). It’s an independent detailed analysis of the key features and major product improvements that Panorama made in our latest product release.

“NovaView offers end-to-end BI delivery, and it does it quite well. Panorama has clearly used its deep knowledge of OLAP and MDX to produce some of the very best delivery options on the market today. Businesses that are looking to extend their existing Microsoft data warehouse and BI solutions or make PowerPivot enterprise-ready should strongly consider NovaView.”

Read full NovaView 6.2 product review in SQL Server Magazine

I recently contributed a thought leadership article to the Microsoft SQL Server Team Blog around PowerPivot and the value it brings to the Analysis Services platform. It’s a hot topic these days, so please share your thoughts & ideas here or on the Microsoft Blog, and join the conversation!

“As Microsoft PowerPivot is gaining more popularity and exposure, BI professionals ask more and more questions about PowerPivot’s role in the organization in trying to understand what value the new in-memory BI solution from Microsoft brings, along with the benefits and the limitations of it. Is PowerPivot going to replace SQL Server Analysis Services? If so, how soon? What should be done with the existing BI solution? Or maybe both can coexist and serve different needs?

In order to answer these questions and understand both short and long term impacts of the new products on your BI solution we need to understand what motivated Microsoft to release this new creature and where do they position it. Microsoft are trying to achieve two main goals – introduce a new in-memory engine for data processing and promote the self-service BI concept extending the usage of BI systems to a wider audience.”

Read full article at Microsoft SQL Server Team Blog: PowerPivot & Analysis Services – The Value of Both

Business intelligence has been the top priority for most CIOs for the last five years. Their customers, the business users, always want to get more and more information at their fingertips in order to support them in their decision-making processes. As the amount of information grows exponentially, and as the business landscape changes at a faster pace, business users are eager for more and more aggregated, filtered, focused information to help them run the business.

What an ideal situation for the CIO — customers who want more and more. But the fact of life is that the demand for more analytics places CIOs in a tough spot.

Traditionally, in order to provide fast responses to almost random questions coming from various users, the CIO had to set up a data warehouse (or at least a data mart), define the parameters that are relevant to the business users, define the metrics they wish to measure, and create a “Cube” — a multidimensional data warehouse with enough pre-aggregations that can provide complex responses at lightning speed. The process just described requires professional skills, server capacity and processes. So as more and more users queued up to get their analytics done, CIOs found it hard to deliver so many solutions concurrently.

Read the full article at CIOZone: Reconciling In-Memory and Server-Based Analytics

Microsoft Israel and Panorama invite you to a live event that will be taking place in Tel Aviv, Israel on July 25, 2010. We’ll have a special guest speaker – Amir Netz, one of the key PowerPivot project leaders (and was formerly a part of the Panorama team!). Amir, together with Kobi, Averbuch – VP of R&D at Panorama – will discuss PowerPivot as a self-service BI solution, and how you can unleash the power of PowerPivot in an enterprise environment.

Learn more or register >>

We’ll see you there!

If you hadn’t noticed yet, cloud computing is reaching for the stars.

Companies everywhere are realizing the savings on operational costs and hardware that cloud computing brings to the table. And yes, there are many who aren’t sold on the security the cloud offers versus the comforts of keeping data on-premise.

Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, you can’t ignore the facts; both IDC and Gartner are predicting huge numbers for the future of the cloud industry. A recent report by market intelligence firm IDC claims that revenue drawn from cloud computing is expected to reach $55 billion by 2014 (up from its current $16 billion), making it one of the fastest growing trends in IT. IDC also claims that on-premise IT is only moving at a 5 percent annual growth rate—in stark contrast to cloud’s 27 percent rate.

Gartner Research released its own report in late June, a day prior to the IDC report. According to the market research firm, cloud computing should reach $140 billion in global revenue by 2014.

While there is a bit of a disconnect between the two projections, one thing is for sure: the future looks bright for the cloud computing industry

Organizations maintain databases mainly because they expect to obtain valuable insights from them. But in some cases, getting insights from data can be quite a challenge. For organizations that are planning to upgrade to MS SQL Server 2008 R2, including Office / SharePoint 2010, this is about to change with the introduction of the most innovative self-service BI.

PowerPivot, part of the SharePoint 2010 release, is a powerful in-memory engine that allows users to extract large amounts of data from multiple sources, including corporate databases, Excel spreadsheets and external sources, in a very quick & efficient way. It uses an in-memory, column-based storage to enable users to build models in self-service mode, “on the fly”, without having to pre-aggregate or build cubes prior to querying.

NovaView for PowerPivot enables users to leverage this in-memory platform and perform advanced analysis, build pixel perfect reports, create executive dashboards or share the results through SharePoint – all in a secured environment (with data level granularity) and sourcing natively from the PowerPivot platform.

Join us for a webinar, featuring a special guest – Derek Comingore, a SQL Server MVP, speaker at national SQL Server user groups and a published author on SQL Server topics. You will learn more about PowerPivot and how you can empower your users with quick, self-service BI, leveraging your existing investment in the Microsoft platform.

This webinar will showcase how you can:

- Put BI at the fingertips of business users

- Enable users to perform advanced analysis in a fully web-based environment

- Share the results and insights generated in the process with the masses

- Leverage your existing investment in SQL, Office and SharePoint in all their versions

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
10:00 AM ET / 4:00 PM CET – Europe

11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET – Americas

Wednesday July 21, 2010
9:30 AM IST / 1:00 PM KST / 2:00 PM AEST – Asia Pacific

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the Microsoft Western European ISV summit which took place in Portugal. Aside from the obvious fact that Portugal is a beautiful country and we stayed in a wonderful resort, I thought I would share with you some content and feedback from the summit. Microsoft hosted about 40 leading Europeans ISVs. The level of the people who participated was certainly top management. From the business side, I met with CEOs and Managing Directors, and from the technical side, I met mostly with CTOs and Chief Architects. Most of those ISVs are locally managed by Microsoft, hence the partner management level from Microsoft also attended the event. When thinking about it, I believe those leading ISVs serve probably about 40-50% of all the organizations in Europe… which means that every decision they make as an outcome of this conference, will probably have an effect on millions and millions of people. Quite a big power!

Moreover, Microsoft brought their top people from EMEA and also from Redmond (although some got stranded because of the Volcano and the travel disruptions, but I will discuss it later).

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Microsoft just launched SQL Server 2008 R2 that includes Office / SharePoint 2010 and in-memory capabilities (PowerPivot). Panorama Software has always been strongly aligned with Microsoft’s BI strategy and our new product is fully optimized for this new platform.

We are proud to announce the release of the latest version of Panorama NovaView 6.2, the first BI solution to augment the PowerPivot platform by adding more self-service BI capabilities and a missing data level security layer, making it ready for enterprise wide deployments.

Join us for a special launch event where you will learn about upgrades and new products in NovaView BI suite:

- Integration & added value to MS Office / SharePoint 2010
- Native connectivity, a data level security layer & self-service BI capabilities in PowerPivot
- Oracle relational DB support
- And much more!

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Gamers, developers and all-around technical types…get ready to experience the future of gaming with Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox. If you’re attending the Microsoft BI conference in New Orleans this week, you’ll want to head to room 240 on Wednesday, June 9th at 8am for a chance to win an Xbox 360 with the new Project Natal controller system. Panorama Software will give one of these systems away to a lucky attendee at the end of the session.
A revolutionary new hands-free motion controller for games, Project Natal will be available in October, and the winner of the raffle will be one of the first to own the cutting-edge system as soon as it’s available on the market.
The session itself, “Unleash the Power of PowerPivot in Your Enterprise,” will detail how organizations can add unique self-service BI capabilities like intuitive web interface, advanced analytics and a data level security layer on top Microsoft’s new in-memory platform, elevating PowerPivot into a complete BI solution and making it ready for enterprise-wide deployment.
We’ll see you there!

Panorama is launching the new NovaView for PowerPivot at the upcoming Microsoft SQL & BI event which will be taking place in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 30-31, 2010. We invite our customers & partners in Israel to join us in this event to learn more about Microsoft’s new in-memory engine and how you can extend and make it enterprise ready with Panorama NovaView.