Panorama Business Intelligence

In today’s world of information there is no single source of information.

Various vendors compete for being the data source.

In the real world situation it can happen that organization is utilizing more then one system (For example SAP and Microsoft).

The end user doesn’t really care what the source of the data is, he just wants to have it available and with the most ease of use.

A classic example is a dashboard page containing 2 grids of data, one from MS-OLAP source and the other from SAP-BW.

For the user it is just 2 grids, he doesn’t really care where the data comes from.

I don’t want to discuss the challenge of retrieving the data from different platforms. This is a multi-platform challenge by itself.

I want to discuss the Single-Sign-On challenge (SSO).

When the user opts-in to the system he might need to enter his user and password. That’s a fair request in systems that implement security model.

But if the user is getting more than one prompt, that is considered a nag.

Without SSO solution the user will get 2 prompts (one for the Microsoft connection and one for the connection to SAP).

Now the question is what SSO solution the organization has? Again

Like in data source case there is no sole vendor for SSO solution (Surprisingly there is a solution of Microsoft and different solution of SAP) each one with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Organizations may have one of the available SSO solutions and may have none.

Our team at Panorama takes all these considerations into account, and develops a comprehensive solution that can easily interface with existing SSO solution and also provide our own SSO solutions for organizations that do not have any.

I just want to note the important features that SSO solution should have:

1. Secure sensitive data (like passwords)

2. Low management overhead. By that I mean that if and administrator has to manually key in the credential mapping of all the users, it is both time consuming and security breach. The right way is to have the user map his credentials in the first time when they are not defined yet (or when expired).