Panorama Business Intelligence

Mark Smith from Intelligent Enterprise published today a post about  Microsoft’s BI strategy that I found very interesting and relevant (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/08/can_microsoft_p.html ) .
 
In his post, Mark talks about two big challenges with the Microsoft BI strategy.  First, Microsoft BI is a set of many dependant applications that need to be “glued” together and then customized by developers to really become a complete enterprise BI solution.  

Mark wrote,

“while good, there are challenges in the required dependencies of SQL Server and Microsoft Office to make the product deliver its full capabilities. This complexity inevitably adds to the cost of ownership of the Microsoft approach to BI and performance management.”

For example, to get a complete solution to work on the Microsoft stack you need Excel for analysis, SharePoint for the dashboard, Reporting Services, Scorecard manager and PerformancePoint. Some of the big pure play BI vendors suffer from the same issues (BOBJ has different solutions for analytics and reporting that also need to be glued together) but some alternatives such as the ones Panorama offers is an all-in-one solution that provides a completely integrated suite of BI applications – analytics, reporting, scorecards, dashboards. 

While many customers won’t mind doing the customization and configuration of multiple products, others will definitely want a lower TCO and the ability to accelerate their ROI by going with “best of breed” solutions. One of the largest mobile service providers in world selected Panorama over Microsoft primarily due to their concern with of having to deal with a piecing together multiple products vs. an integrated solution.

Another topic that Mark discusses in his blog is reference to Microsoft’s ability to truly make BI pervasive:

“at the core of Microsoft strategy is the next step in utilizing spreadsheets in an enterprise fashion. Yet the basic challenges of business today in managing, delivering and auditing spreadsheets; simplifying access and interaction with information at all levels in an organization; and determining where to extend BI into line-of-business functions are not yet fully addressed in Microsoft PerformancePoint.”

Microsoft believes it has the ability to make BI pervasive because it “owns the desktop”-  especially Excel. While no one disagrees that Excel is extremely pervasive I would argue that very few people use the BI capabilities of Excel (namely Pivot Tables) despite the fact that they are available as part of Excel. I would also argue that Pivot Tables do not make analyzing data any simpler or easier when compared to web-based solutions offered by pure play BI vendors (I would say the opposite is true).

Our personal belief and strategy at Panorama is that pivot table technology will never meet the needs of the entire BI user community.  You can definitely make it easier to use with more powerful capabilities, but expecting all users to use pivot tables and sophisticated analytical and reporting tools is highly unlikely, despite the fact that is readily available inside Excel. 

Our approach is totally different, we believe that insights should be made available in non-BI tools all together (see http://www.businessintelligence.com/ex/asp/id.2819/xe/binewsdetail.htm and http://www.panorama.com/products/nova-view-spotlight/index.html ).