Panorama Business Intelligence

An interesting interview with Rony Ross, the Founder of Panorama Software, that was posted on Israel Innovation 2.0:

Last month I posted an interview with Rony Ross about being a successful woman in technology. Aside from this, we also discussed in depth the business intelligence software company that she founded, Panorama Software, including its growth over the years, business intelligence (BI) trends and what we can expect from Panorama this year. Here is that part of our discussion.

Panorama Software was founded in 1993 and moved its headquarters to North America in 2003, what factors went into the decision to move the headquarters?

In 2002, Panorama realized that the marketplace for its products is growing and decided to become a global company. We decided we needed a North American presence, including sales, marketing, support, finance and product management and that moving the headquarters to North America was a logical step.

We evaluated various locations, and were determined to concentrate on locations that had daily direct flights to Israel. One of Panorama’s directors suggested Toronto, Canada. It was deemed a great choice, both for the favorable (at the time) value of the Canadian Dollar vs. the US dollar, as well as having daily direct flights to Israel.

What steps did the move entail?
(more…)

Great post from Datacentrix, our partner in South Africa!

The recent tightening in partnership between Microsoft and Panorama Software bodes well for those companies wanting to complete their BI offerings with the delivery of a fast, powerful BI front-end.

“The combination of Panorama and Microsoft BI provides users with a powerful, end-to-end BI offering delivering rapid insight and allowing for speedy decision making,” says Anton Jacobsz, sales executive at Datacentrix.

As a ProfitBase Authorised Reseller, Datacentrix maintains that Panorama’s NovaView suite of proactive BI solutions opens a new world for local users of ProfitBase 2009, a scalable, rapidly configured, graphical, data warehouse and OLAP Cube deployment accelerator for Microsoft SQL Server.

Jacobsz says that, following the recent release of Panorama’s NovaView 6 and the technical preview announcement of Office 2010, together, Panorama and Microsoft have extended BI to even more users across the globe. NovaView 6.0 combines numerous features, from query and analysis, formatted reporting, performance dashboard and KPI scorecards, to modeling, advanced visualisation and automated report distribution. Not only does it boast an even more robust platform designed to bring more users to BI, but also new deployment wizards and applications to make it Panorama’s biggest release at this point.

(more…)

Want to know how a prominent recycled paper and packaging company cut reporting time in half and lowered inventory by 20 percent? Then read on!

In 2005, the business intelligence department at Cascades Tissue Group (a division of Quebec-based Cascades) was looking for a more dynamic BI solution for reporting and analysis, one that could potentially reduce inventory levels, more easily develop custom reports and improve efficiency and profitability in certain areas. Since that year, Panorama NovaView has done just that for the manufacturer. About 70 inventory, sales and supply chain/production managers and customer service reps leverage NovaView for a more connected and educational analysis experience.

Starting with a Cognos application and moving to an Excel add-on app for browsing OLAP cubes from SQL, the group needed to add functionality for end users—allowing them to create and modify reports without specialized analytical skills. With NovaView, training only took a few hours, and reports only take half as much time to create or tweak.

Sales and inventory staffers can perform custom analysis by creating their own Excel or PDF reports via NovaView’s web-based platform if standard reports don’t offer enough information. “The software is like using a pivot table in Excel,” said Jocelyn Laberge, a veteran in Cascades’ BI department. “You just drag and drop fields into the grid and right-click to make selections.”
(more…)

While everyone is excited about Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010 launch, many have shown interest in extending those tools with a complete end-to-end BI solution that will satisfy the needs of the most advanced users as well as the broader information worker community.

Join Microsoft and Panorama teams as we discuss an end-to-end BI solution that brings together the best of SQL, Office and SharePoint with Panorama NovaView suite, enabling users to perform even deeper analysis in a web environment.

We will also demonstrate tight integration with PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new in-memory engine) that enables users to perform even more sophisticated analysis, build interactive reports or create executive dashboards – all sourcing natively from PowerPivot.

This webcast will showcase how you can:

- Leverage your existing investment in SQL, Office and SharePoint in all their versions
- Give analysts powerful tools to find hidden insights
- Make BI simpler for business users
- Create interactive reports on top of any data: OLAP, in-memory (PowerPivot), relational and Spreadsheets

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/421096121

As the IT industry enters 2010, Panorama Software is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary of excellence in the business intelligence community. From Panorama’s first generation OLAP product (acquired by Microsoft) through the sixth generation NovaView, the first BI solution to work in the cloud, to today’s complete hybrid solution, the company has represented a hotbed of innovation for the IT community.

“When we launched our first product release out of Israel in March 1995, developers coming out of the Israeli army were turning the location into a hotbed for IT creativity and innovation,” said Rony Ross, founder and chairperson of Panorama Software. “Since then, we’ve helped launch the first web-deployed, cloud-enabled and now fully hybrid business intelligence platforms in the industry.”

The first generation product helped companies deploy a smart, optimized multi-dimensional database to handle the huge amounts of data they were accumulating in their corporate databases, making the data available for analysis in a friendly and easy to use EIS (Executive Information System) environment. In October 1996, Microsoft acquired the Panorama OLAP technology, which was further developed and rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated into the SQL Server platform.
(more…)