Panorama Business Intelligence

More than a decade ago, a small team of people set out to develop technology that seems to be the holy grail of modern day information management – data access and data relevancy. Panorama answered the challenges its customers faced by developing an online analytical processing (OLAP) solution and a language that could take raw data and turn it into relevant information. Microsoft took this OLAP and MDX technology we created and turned it into a foundation on which an entire ecosystem of BI solutions was built upon. This was the first wave of BI.

Today I believe we are in the verge of creating the next wave in BI. And in this new wave we move the focus away from systems and IT to people and process. At Panorama we call it Proactive Business Intelligence. Below is a recent memo I sent to all of the employees at Panorama that explains our vision for Proactive BI and the innovations we are making to lead this emerging market.

 

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From: Eynav Azarya
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 12:42 PM
To: Panorama All Employees
Subject: Announcing – Proactive BI – from vision to execution
Importance: High

Panoramies,

I recently had an opportunity to speak with someone about Panorama. We spoke about our rich history, our partnerships with some of the largest companies in the world and our impressive list of customers. We then shifted our conversation and spoke about the future of Panorama, where we’re headed and how we intend to ride one of biggest market waves in high-tech today.

Over the past two years you’ve been hearing and reading about our vision and roadmap around Proactive Business Intelligence (PBI). PBI is a result of many hours of market research and analysis conducted more than two years ago by R&D, product-management, marketing, strategy and sales. We looked at the market closely, identifying trends and challenges faced by information workers. We spoke to our customers, partners and industry experts. Our objective was to define our future direction and where we would emerge as market leaders.

Our analysis resulted with the following key findings:

1. Over the last 30 years while BI has evolved significantly in the “back end,” making the delivery of reports easier for IT, but at the same time not much has changed for the end user. While information workers receive reports they need, they are still left to their own devices to determine what’s most important and what requires their attention. They are still unable to FOCUS ON WHAT’S RELEVANT.
2. All BI vendors claim to make “BI actionable.” However, no vendor today provides technology that allows an end user to truly take context-sensitive actions. Actions are unstructured and completely disconnected from their business intelligence. Without STRUCTURED ACTIONS, decision makers must figure out on their own what to do when they are presented with an insight.
3. Two of the fastest growing markets today are BI and Business Process Management (BPM). Both are equally important inside a company. BI provides insight, while BPM manages processes inside the organization. However these two worlds are disconnected, with no easy way to AUTOMATE THE ROUTINE and bridge the gap between intelligence and process.
4. Data exists in many places and on many platforms – SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, other BI platforms and customers don’t want to move data around. What they want are smart solutions that natively work across any data source.

We took these findings and asked Kobi and the R&D leadership team to find solutions for these problems that we could build in 3 to 5 years. As always (since we have the smartest people in the BI) the team came back with a roadmap – a powerful combination of two innovative technologies – codenamed IG and Sycamore.

IG or Information Gatherer is the codename for technology that will enable end users to proactively receive insights and metrics (as opposed to simply getting reports and views) allowing them to focus on what’s truly relevant. IG provides an “out of the box” solution that integrates BI with workflow and business process, enabling end users to ‘right click’ and trigger a workflow that will guide them to a structured action. Sycamore is our next generation platform that will enable all the above as well as the ability to go beyond SAP and Microsoft to support numerous platforms (Microsoft, SAP, Essbase, IBM and others), allowing customers to access the data and information they need, wherever it may be.

In parallel, Marketing is working to define a new market segment for PBI. They are working closely with the analyst community to garner interest and get feedback on PBI. In fact, in a recent briefing with Forrester on PBI, one of the lead BI analysts commented that he was very impressed with Panorama’s thought leadership in the convergence of BI and BPM.

There are four pillars to PBI that our solutions will address:
- Cross Platform Support – we expanded our support from Microsoft to SAP and we will continue to grow our ability to work on other platforms.
- Focus on the Relevant – ensure we build solutions such as NovaView Spotlight that provide users insights in smart ways – our advanced exception management capabilities is another great example.
- Structured Actions – allows users to take actions from within a BI solution; our forthcoming integration with workflow and BPM engines will enable this.
- Automate the Routine – connect BI to business process management solutions such as Pegasystems.

Over the next few weeks you will be reading a lot more about PBI and our vision for the future of business intelligence. Next week we will officially announce our strategic partnership with Pegasystems and how together we will help companies automate the routine by integrating Panorama NovaView with the smart business processes engine of Pegasystems to enable drive smart processes. We’ll also announce our future PBI roadmap, as well as the official beta for our newest product, NovaView Spotlight, the first product built around the concept of PBI – focusing on the relevant.

As always I want to thank each and every one of you for sharing, contributing and executing on our vision! It’s going to be a great ride.

Yours,
Navi, CEO, Panorama Software