Panorama Business Intelligence

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.

Panorama on the other hand has no platform. We try to differentiate by focusing on that thing we don’t have…. We just have the apps and all they do is connect using ODBO/MDX to the BW info Providers natively. The applications were built specifically for SAP BW using their own “flavor” and nuances of MDX fully designed to work natively on the SAP BW platform. No metadata layer, no data extraction, no separate security….

So as an SAP customer who should you chose as your best BI solution? As much as I would like to say it is an easy call, it really depends;

If the SAP customer does not see the SAP BW platform as THE strategic data warehouse of the organization but rather an ETL and staging platform for SAP R/3 data, then Cognos and BOBJ might be the better solutions. Their solutions have the advantage of being able to also bring in data from home grown solutions and other applications, the manage the data and metadata on their platform, they make the source of the data transparent.

On the other hand, if the customer sees SAP BW as THE platform of choice, one that they are investing in strategically to make it as close to perfect as possible, then Panorama might be the better choice.

Why? Because those customers probably really would want to use only the SAP BEX and the other SAP front end applications but can’t do so just because those applications are truly complex and do not enable self service reporting for end users, nor they provide the ability for users to “ask” business questions and get instant replies. So Panorama’s solution in this environment simply takes the native features from BW and exposes them in a very intuitive way to the end user. Actually one user could be using BEX and another could be using Panorama’s solution.