Panorama Business Intelligence

“We are making BI pervasive buy putting pivot tables on every desktop with our latest office suite” ; “We re-designed our product to use the latest Adobe technology to make BI tools more powerful”; “Every company needs BI”….

These are just a few quotes you will find in many press releases and interviews with BI vendors. What strikes me about these quotes is the fact that BI vendors are innovating the tool rather than focusing on solving the business problems for which BI was originally created; enabling information workers and managers to get insights into the business so every employee can make better and smarter decisions. Things have become so absurd where most BI tools are improving in directions that have very little to do with the solving the main business problems. 

As long as BI vendors just focus on making pivot table and report creation tools “better” BI won’t become any better in helping solve the real business problem… how many people will ever use a Pivot Table (weather it is in excel of in a web browser? 1%?)

How many companies can clearly state that information workers have solved the pains mentioned above? I know very few. Even CIOs have forgotten the reasons why they purchased BI solutions and who it really affected at the end of the day—again, the information worker.

The reason I am saying all of this is because I am reading about the innovation / lack of innovation in times of market consolidation and I couldn’t agree more with the general feeling; BOBJ and Cognos are going to be so busy integrating their reporting tools with new platforms, forcing  smaller vendors to look again at  the business pains and try to solve them in innovative ways.

Is there a customer willing to state here that the pains BI was supposed to solve were really solved by the tools he/she chose? Better yet, are there customers here who know that Panorama Software is innovating for the information worker with our Proactive Business Intelligence initiative? It is important to know which companies innovate the product for the advancement of the product, and which companies combine product innovation for the benefit of the information worker. Know your options. I would love to hear your comments.