Panorama Business Intelligence

IDC predicts that the virtualization market will grow to $11.7B by 2011!!! I must admit I am quite new to this market but lately we have seen a great uptake of our Virtual appliance solution.

I wonder how big this will be for BI? we think (hope?) that this will be big. we are actually investing in it quite a lot.

For those of you reading about the Panorama virtual appliance for the first time, we basically pre-installed, pre-cofigured and optimized a Virtual server with our BI suite. The solution ships with sample data but using a very simple wizard you can just connect to any existing data source. So deploying a BI solution that includes everything from Analytics, reporting, dashboarding, scorecarding and visualization takes literally about 10 minutes if you have the ability to add the machine to your domain….

So far, most of the downloads we’ve seen are for people evaluating BI solutions and those looking to take advantage of the 10 free users in a local department deployment…. But some do ask questions that show clear signs of where virtualization is going.

For example, the director of BI of one of the big banks asked us if our virtual appliance was designed to be used in production, someone else complained that the version we shipped does not support clusters…. 

So stay tuned for a new version that will come soon that will support the above….

to download our current version go to http://www.panorama.com/challenge

Administrating Panorama NovaView is a great responsibility. The NovaView Administrator (NVA) must carefully read the documentation which was shipped with the product (You’ll find it in C:\Program Files\Panorama\E-BI\Documentation). Nevertheless, the NVA must also read the Panorama Knowledge Base once in a while and he has the responsibility to install the Hot Fixes and Planned Fixes when they published in the support site.

Considering the fact that the NVA may have difficulties with all this responsibility, here are some tips for the beginner NVA:

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More and more BI articles and blogs address the importance of powerful exception management capabilities to ensure users don’t get overwhelmed by BI data and make it usable in a powerful way. In this post about how to move from information to intelligence the writer talks about how important and how powerful it is to add process data into BI but makes a comment that the only way to make this effective is by adding powerful exception handling capabilities.
 

                “The detection of changes taking place that affect business – especially those changes that cost the business the most, namely the breakdown of processes due to exceptions – and particularly at an early, pre-critical stage, is just the type of information that becomes ‘timely intelligence.’ Understanding change within the organization requires having a memory of norms, and triggering when thresholds are violated.”

One of the biggest issues in BI today is the inability of information workers to Focus on the Relevant data out of the oceans of data they get exposed to in forms of reports and spreadsheets.

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We all keep reading about how BI vendors  have ‘cracked to code’ of making  BI really pervasive – “BI for the masses”. I just read this post from Shawn Rogers that talks about that.

When I look at the last 30 years of BI, what I see is mostly evolution on the back end. Most of what changed in the last 30 years from a BI perspective is just better, simpler, cheaper ways of building reports out of operational data. Data today is much cleaner and much (MUCH) more available for report / analytical view creation.

But did that really make an impact on usage of BI by the masses or did it simplify the work of those that used analytics and reports anyhow? Is BI pervasive just because it is so easy for IT and analysts to build reports? Has the fact that Excel is 50% cheaper than a pure play BI solution made a real BI adoption difference? Is BI, from an end user perspective, all that difference?

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Company Announces New Platform that Enables BPM Vendors to Easily Add BI to Existing Solutions

Toronto, Ontario – July 5, 2007 – Panorama Software, a global leader in Proactive Business Intelligence (PBI) solutions, today unveiled its plans to provide unique capabilities of providing seamless integration of BI with leading Business Process Management (BPM) solutions as part of its proactive Business Intelligence roadmap.

“BI and BPM markets are converging,” said Eynav Azarya, CEO, Panorama Software.  “BI today is about actions with context and business processes are becoming less and less manually-driven. When we recently announced our Proactive BI roadmap we decided to be the first BI software company that provides the ability to bring BI and BPM closer together to enable structured actions and to automate business processes.”

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