Panorama Business Intelligence

Microsoft will be hosting their first BI conference next week here in Seattle.  Panorama is excited to take part in this year’s inaugural event as this marks almost ten years since Microsoft first announced Analysis Services, the OLAP technology acquired from Panorama in 1996.  We welcome everyone to come by the Panorama booth (#129) in the exhibition center, speak to Panorama’s technical BI experts and Join us at our special coctail reception….     

Join Panorama for an evening you won’t forget at the Seattle Space Needle…

Experience a panoramic view of Seattle.
Panorama Software welcomes you to Seattle
and the 2007 Microsoft Business Intelligence
Conference. 

We invite you to join us for a very special
cocktail reception at the top of Seattle’s
greatest landmark, the Space Needle. Sip on
your favorite drink and enjoy 360º panoramic
views 520 feet above Seattle – on us.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007
8:00 PM to 1:00 AM
Space Needle – Observation Deck 
Complimentary shuttle service to and from
the Washington Convention Center, as well as
the official hotels for the Microsoft Conference
all evening.

Space is limited so register now to get your
VIP pass. 
Forward this invitation to your friends and
colleagues!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is well known that MDX is the standard language for querying OLAP servers… Today MDX is become the de-facto standard for querying most OLAP servers, such as Microsoft Analysis-Services, SAP BW, Hyperion etc.

In that case you might probably think that supporting one OLAP platform’s MDX means you’ve covered them all…. Is that the case?

nope!

(more…)

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8357

This article talks about the recent BI hardware appliances from IBM, BOBJ, etc.  Interesting that they didn’t mention Cognos’s recent acquisition of dashboard appliance vendor Celequest.

I hope TDWi and other trade pubs will devote some serious attention to the VIRTUAL appliance option which provides some significant advantages to the customer.  You can read all about it from the industry leader, VMware:  http://www.vmware.com/appliances/.

Oh, and incidentally, Panorama is the first BI solution provider to offer a fully-functional virtual appliance, and we’re making it very easy for customers to get:  www.panorama.com/challenge.

Cindi Howson recently wrote an interesting article about BI in the airline industry:  http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/03/airlines_bi_to.html.

Cindi’s analysis is spot on, especially that the airline industry has a lot of room for improvement and that choosing the right BI solution will help.  As with any organization’s BI implementation, success for an airline is dependent on 2 things:

1. Careful planning: data organization, modeling, etc.

2. Achieving a high level of end-user adoption.  This is driven by usability and query response time, both of which are things that Panorama takes great pride in.

I read this article about “the 8 steps of choosing the best BI solution”. While I think this is an interesting read and has a lot of good concepts, I think there is one missing step which is the “reality check” phase. My experience tells me that while it is a wishful thinking, in reality you never start an evaluation from a clean slate.  If I am running SAP for ERP and Hyperion for BPM I most probably will start by looking at SAP’s BI stack and Hyperion’s stack. In a world where customers are trying to standardize on the latform side it just makes sense to start this way. it’s just a pragmatic and realistic way of starting the process – and this is what customers actually do first.