Panorama Business Intelligence

Microsoft’s “Project Gemini” has finally materialized into something solid and extremely powerful: PowerPivot for Excel 2010. Information workers that love Excel can build powerful analytical applications and organize millions of rows of data into a workbook for simple sharing and collaboration with other team members. This is a huge step for Microsoft—one that greatly benefits independent software vendors (ISVs).

PowerPivot is unique in that it puts BI at the fingertips of business users while offering better visibility for management and monitoring of collaboration using Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 based management tools. Its applications for Excel 2010 generate faster insights and better decision-making for business users.

But there’s even bigger news about PowerPivot: the platform will offer new opportunities to third-party BI ISVs to break new, undiscovered ground with their solutions. As an example, Panorama NovaView’s next major release will build on PowerPivot’s in-memory data engine and extend the Excel functionality. This will enable users to perform advanced analysis through the browser as well as build models from any data source using a simple wizard.

Here at Panorama, we’re rooting for the PowerPivot team (a couple of them are former Panoramies) in their quest to perfect one of the best inventions developed for the BI space over the last few years.