Panorama Business Intelligence

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the Microsoft Western European ISV summit which took place in Portugal. Aside from the obvious fact that Portugal is a beautiful country and we stayed in a wonderful resort, I thought I would share with you some content and feedback from the summit. Microsoft hosted about 40 leading Europeans ISVs. The level of the people who participated was certainly top management. From the business side, I met with CEOs and Managing Directors, and from the technical side, I met mostly with CTOs and Chief Architects. Most of those ISVs are locally managed by Microsoft, hence the partner management level from Microsoft also attended the event. When thinking about it, I believe those leading ISVs serve probably about 40-50% of all the organizations in Europe… which means that every decision they make as an outcome of this conference, will probably have an effect on millions and millions of people. Quite a big power!

Moreover, Microsoft brought their top people from EMEA and also from Redmond (although some got stranded because of the Volcano and the travel disruptions, but I will discuss it later).

During the summit, Microsoft shared with their partners everything about their BI strategy and Azure, helping all the ISVs plan the rest of FY10, but most importantly plan for FY11. There were couple of very interesting presentations carried by Chris Dial, Madhu Kachru and Jaime Perena, on how an ISV can leverage the Microsoft global marketing machine. It was fascinating to see how much can you get from Microsoft… to be very honest, although I am proud to be a company that knows very well how to utilize the Microsoft machine, I also found some options which I didn’t know about such as ‘video reference or quote’, etc.

As an ISV, getting the word out there, about your solution, is not an easy task, but partnering with Microsoft makes it somewhat easier.

There were fascinating presentations about Microsoft Technology roadmaps. First, I would like to discuss Azure. Michal Maggs did a very interesting presentation, but what was even more amazing, was the real commitment Microsoft put on the cloud. I have seen Microsoft speaking about it for couple of years now, but in this event, there were no questions. Microsoft is in the cloud game, and they are there to win. They have quite a good starting point, with more than 1 billion PC’s running windows and more than 500 million PC’s running Office. Their Servers and .Net is everywhere and now, they made a huge bet on the cloud (not sure that Bet is the right word here, so maybe I should say investment). Their core message was “we are all in… Cloud”. And they are. They are working hard to bring all their on-premise applications and services to the cloud, and it is very intriguing. During the breakouts I met with some executives who said, ‘as an ISV we need to focus on value to our customers, not on solving integration issues… the cloud will solve all that’.

At Panorama, as an innovator in cloud based BI, we know the drill very well – cloud helps us decrease costs, drive innovation and increase customer productivity via our applications. We believe Azure will be very attractive to our customers as well.

There were lots of discussions and presentations about SQL and BI.. Chris Dial gave his pitch and the audience loved it. SQL is not just a database anymore. Anyone who tries to compare it to mysql will find he compared Oranges to peanuts (or Champagne to water). SQL has so many attractive services that make your application shine. Many of the ISV’s wanted to hear the BI story and we were fortunate to have the opportunity to present our story as well. Since Microsoft acquired our OLAP technology, we continued to develop very innovative BI applications on the Microsoft platform. According to the recent OLAP Survey we continue to lead the market of 3rd party BI applications on this platform. During the presentation we shared how an ISV can and should extend their application with BI capabilities. Microsoft makes it very easy today, and the value for the users is enormous. (so does the revenue for the ISV).

Donald Farmer, probably the smartest and the funniest guru in Microsoft was supposed to attend in person, but poor Donald, the volcanic ash won the battle and he attended via live meeting. Donald is such a fluent speaker that even via the internet line he discussed PowerPivot with such enthusiasm that it made everyone in the room excited, wanting to try it out in that very second. There was also a demo (recorded) which was done by Amir Netz, an old friend, who presented some cool stuff done with PowerPivot. We’re proud to say that Panorama is the first and only ISV who developed an application that extends PowerPivot and makes it ‘enterprise ready’. Many of the ISVs wanted to learn more about PowerPivot, how they can develop on this new in-memory platform, and how they can take it to their customers.

A little bird whispered to me that the next summit is going to be hosted in Austria and Microsoft is going to discuss topics such as how to move applications to the cloud with Azure… how to market and sell it…. Also, many ISVs wanted more information on how to integrate BI deeper into their applications, so I assume this process will be covered as well. And last but not least, how to ride the Microsoft market beast, and leverage it to your advantage (i.e – what programs can you take advantage of…)