Panorama Business Intelligence

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

On this site http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/ you will find hundreds of virtual appliances. Just download and start using.

What does this have to do with BI?

Well, unfortunately BI is not in a phase to be treated as a “plug and play” solution for the most part. There is one excepting and that is for those BI solutions that have no platform, such as Panorama and some other front applications out there. If you buy Business Objects or Cognos for example there is a lot of tuning you have to do on the platform side  that prevents you from using the BI solution “as is” or just as a “plug and play” solution….

What we did at Panorama is build a pre-packaged BI solution – everything in it pre-installed, pre-configured, ready to run (www.panorama.com/challenge). Just download, add the machine (sorry… Virtual appliance ) to your domain, connect to any MSFT (soon also SAP BW) cube and you are set. With this approach it will take you less than an hour to get a full BI solution….  And the best part is you can try it out for free and do not have to buy the hardware that is mandatory in hardware appliances.