Panorama Business Intelligence

I guess that you got an alert about this blog, by the small window that popped-up (and if not, register now!). I guess that you also really like the SMS idea…

People have become so dynamic. Whether it is good or bad (my wife and I still arguing), one thing is for sure: we should get used to it. All of us, as consumers of services, don’t want to spend time in searching for what we need. we want to say what we need, and we want it to get to us.

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At Panorama we have a saying that “MDX is like chess – knowing the rules doesn’t mean you know hoe to play”.

Don’t believe it? Okay, let’s play!

If you don’t know much about MDX, these are the rules of your game:

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Leading BI Vendor Offers Revolutionary New Model for Business Intelligence

Seattle, WA & Toronto, Ontario – May 9, 2007 – Panorama Software, a global leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle, Washington, its next big bet in the BI software space through the Company’s flagship solution, Panorama NovaView®. Panorama is introducing Proactive Business Intelligence (PBI), a new model for the BI industry based on the need for a forward-thinking approach to enhance the enterprise through innovative BI.

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We keep hearing that Excel is the “simple to use” tool that will help make BI pervasive across the organization. 

I guess this really depends on what you call BI. If BI is a bunch of numbers in cells then this statement is true. Everybody knows how to use Excel by putting numbers in cells and doing basic manipulations such as sorting and filtering the grid. 

But when I think about BI and analytics I actually think about doing more OLAP-based analysis. For that you need PivotTables inside Excel to make it an effective BI tool.   How many people really use PivotTables? Very few! That is because it is not that simple and intuitive. 

So why do some vendors think that Excel is the tool that makes BI pervasive when, in fact, it doesn’t really combine the two fundamentals of power and ease-of-use?

Complete is defined as “having all necessary or normal parts, components, or steps; entire.” In Business Intelligence the word complete is used by nearly every solution provider, including Panorama. If we take the definition of complete as stated earlier to be true, then one could argue that if a BI provider has all the necessary parts or components to a complete BI solution – analysis, reporting, scorecards, dashboards, etc they are in fact “complete.”

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There’s been a lot of consolidation in the BI market recently; however the one that has caught the attention of many is Tibco’s acquisition of Spotfire. What does this latest pairing signal to the market? Has the market finally raised the need for solutions that integrate BI, BPM and workflow?

It’s been over a year since Panorama announced its Proactive BI (PBI) strategy. PBI brings together BI, BPM and workflow into one integrated solution. Our approach from the beginning was to be agnostic to the different BPM solutions currently in the market; integrating with any BPM solution a customer might be using. We did however decide to provide, out of the box, integration with one workflow engine to ensure that our customers could immediately benefit from PBI.

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Very interesting post by Rajan Chandras about how BI impacts competitive advantage.

My first reaction to this post relates to how far most companies are from achieving that ultimate goal of using analytics by all users to make a different and generate a true competitive advantage. While we all read about the trend “du jour” of BI for the masses, the reality is very different.  Most companies have not managed to get analytics to the hands of end users in a way that enables them to interact with the data and generate competitive insights, BI and analytics is still in the hands of analysts and a select number of users. There are many reasons for that but the 2 I feel are the most important are : 1) usability of analytics – which is still not intuitive enough to be as simple as a word processing application, (2) Ability to focus on the relevant. Because of ERP, CRM and other systems, volumes of data are growing exponentially, reports that users get have too much data and makes it very difficult to “Focus on the relevant”.

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Last night was a blast!! Thank you all so much for making this evening so successful! We had over 800 people in total that came to enjoy a very unusual evening at the peak of Seattle! the weather was perfect, the view was unusual and the mood was excellent!

Pictures of the event will be uploaded soon and I will post the link on this Blog.

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Let me start by saying this post will not talk about features at all. Every BI vendor claims to have superior functionality but at the end of the day this will not be the reason for choosing one vendor over the other in the SAP world.

Both, Business Objects and Cognos, really emphasis the fact that they deliver more than just BI applications, they also provide a complete BI platform. The reason for that is very obvious; if you sell only front end applications these become easy to replace and customers are not willing to pay as much, but on the other hand, if you do manage to get  your platform in the account – you are probably there to stay for a long time and get premium pricing on software, services and maintenance.

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Interesting post by Dan E. Linstedt talking about appliances.

In the last year I came to learn about the notion of Virtual appliances. In many ways there is nothing new to it. VPC from Microsoft and VMware have been around for a while. The only difference now is that more and more enterprise organizations are starting to “go virtual”. I’ve seen large companies deploying Exchange server, CRM and other mission critical applications on VMware software. 

If you stop and think about the trends in the software world today – Why are customers looking for SaaS solutions? Why are they looking at hardware appliances? In many cases for the same reason: they are looking for a “plug and play” solution, no configuration, pre-configued, pre-installed, ready to run.

Well… guess what, Virtual appliances get you all of that and has even additional benefits:

• No subscriptions like in SaaS
• You don’t host your data by any company like in SaaS solutions.
• No hardware required. Just use on any server (unlike hardware appliances)
• Easy to “upgrade” since you can move it around from one server to another serer that has more power, or just upgrade the OS on the VA.
• Can be used with any OS. Hardware appliances are mostly Linux
• Are easier to manage environment – it’s basically just like a “normal” machine

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