Panorama Business Intelligence

The world of productivity suites has never been more interesting. Just when we all thought it was over and Microsoft’s dominance of this world was set for eternity, things seem to be moving…. Moving very fast.

 

The following are just a few of the new players in this space:

Adobe with www.buzzword.com

Yahoo with www.Zimbra.com

Google docs/apps www.google.com/docs

http://www.editgrid.com/

http://www.smartsheet.com/home

www.zoho.com

 

While these alternatives might appeal to the consumers, businesses will probably still have to wait till they can switch from Microsoft Office System into these other productivity suites.

The main reason for that is the evolution of Office and what it can do beyond basic word processing and spreadsheets.

If you follow the evolution of MS Office you’ve probably heard about their “OBA” strategy (OBA = Office Business Applications) which is basically the strategy of building business solutions based on the extended Office suite.

The first and most strategic OBA is Business Intelligence. Since BI is one of the most important business application according to Gartner, Microsoft has decided to bring that functionality into office . By tying BI directly into Office, Microsoft is ensuring no other productivity suite solution can address the more “business focused” needs of small to large companies and ensure continuity of upgrades to future versions of office.

 

Microsoft Office provides businesses the ability to connect to external data sources through their OLAP engine and create reports and analysis. This ‘feature’ is probably 100 times more strategic to a business then the word processing features of Office.  And while this functionality is not close to what Panorama or other MDX Based BI solutions provide, it still is much better than what the above companies offer.

 

When will all that change? When the above companies realize that they need to address advanced “OBA like” scenarios through development of new functionality or OEMing solutions that can address BI and other business scenarios.