Panorama Business Intelligence

For several years now the industry has been talking about “BI for the masses,” and as more companies, large and small, realize the value and benefit of BI, deploying BI solutions quickly and easily becomes the order of day. One of the greatest impediments to deploying BI to users is the complexity of setting up and configuring BI solutions. The larger and more complex the organization, the greater the chance that deployments will get delayed, or sometimes stopped altogether.

To help overcome this hurdle, a number of vendors have introduced BI appliances. Some of these appliances are a combination of software and hardware (SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator for example) while others are virtual. In a recent Information Week article, http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201805614, Business Objects announced their first virtual BI appliance. As solutions providers, I applaud the industry for the innovations made by vendors such as SAP and Business Objects for their appliances. Panorama is proud to have been the first BI vendor to deliver a virtual BI appliance last May. Since launch, we’ve distributed thousands of copies of our BI appliance for free.

In my opinion, to have a successful experience with virtual appliances, they should:

- Be able to “plug and play” – connecting to data sources out of the box
- Requires no customization – pre-installed software is not enough, the appliance should be sophisticated enough and configured that eliminates customization
- Leverage existing BI platforms with requiring having to install another platform on top of another

Panorama NovaView Virtual Appliance provides these capabilities and more. I encourage everyone to test drive our virtual appliance and experience the power of BI. Logon to http://challenge.panorama.com/forms/default.aspx for more details.