Panorama Business Intelligence

We just recently released NovaView 6.2 that includes NovaView for Office 2010/SharePoint 2010 (including PowerPivot), and we’re happy to share the latest product review in SQL Server Magazine. It was written by Derek Comingore, Microsoft SQL Server MVP (Most Valued Professional). It’s an independent detailed analysis of the key features and major product improvements that Panorama made in our latest product release.

“NovaView offers end-to-end BI delivery, and it does it quite well. Panorama has clearly used its deep knowledge of OLAP and MDX to produce some of the very best delivery options on the market today. Businesses that are looking to extend their existing Microsoft data warehouse and BI solutions or make PowerPivot enterprise-ready should strongly consider NovaView.”

Read full NovaView 6.2 product review in SQL Server Magazine

I recently contributed a thought leadership article to the Microsoft SQL Server Team Blog around PowerPivot and the value it brings to the Analysis Services platform. It’s a hot topic these days, so please share your thoughts & ideas here or on the Microsoft Blog, and join the conversation!

“As Microsoft PowerPivot is gaining more popularity and exposure, BI professionals ask more and more questions about PowerPivot’s role in the organization in trying to understand what value the new in-memory BI solution from Microsoft brings, along with the benefits and the limitations of it. Is PowerPivot going to replace SQL Server Analysis Services? If so, how soon? What should be done with the existing BI solution? Or maybe both can coexist and serve different needs?

In order to answer these questions and understand both short and long term impacts of the new products on your BI solution we need to understand what motivated Microsoft to release this new creature and where do they position it. Microsoft are trying to achieve two main goals – introduce a new in-memory engine for data processing and promote the self-service BI concept extending the usage of BI systems to a wider audience.”

Read full article at Microsoft SQL Server Team Blog: PowerPivot & Analysis Services – The Value of Both

Business intelligence has been the top priority for most CIOs for the last five years. Their customers, the business users, always want to get more and more information at their fingertips in order to support them in their decision-making processes. As the amount of information grows exponentially, and as the business landscape changes at a faster pace, business users are eager for more and more aggregated, filtered, focused information to help them run the business.

What an ideal situation for the CIO — customers who want more and more. But the fact of life is that the demand for more analytics places CIOs in a tough spot.

Traditionally, in order to provide fast responses to almost random questions coming from various users, the CIO had to set up a data warehouse (or at least a data mart), define the parameters that are relevant to the business users, define the metrics they wish to measure, and create a “Cube” — a multidimensional data warehouse with enough pre-aggregations that can provide complex responses at lightning speed. The process just described requires professional skills, server capacity and processes. So as more and more users queued up to get their analytics done, CIOs found it hard to deliver so many solutions concurrently.

Read the full article at CIOZone: Reconciling In-Memory and Server-Based Analytics

Microsoft Israel and Panorama invite you to a live event that will be taking place in Tel Aviv, Israel on July 25, 2010. We’ll have a special guest speaker – Amir Netz, one of the key PowerPivot project leaders (and was formerly a part of the Panorama team!). Amir, together with Kobi, Averbuch – VP of R&D at Panorama – will discuss PowerPivot as a self-service BI solution, and how you can unleash the power of PowerPivot in an enterprise environment.

Learn more or register >>

We’ll see you there!

If you hadn’t noticed yet, cloud computing is reaching for the stars.

Companies everywhere are realizing the savings on operational costs and hardware that cloud computing brings to the table. And yes, there are many who aren’t sold on the security the cloud offers versus the comforts of keeping data on-premise.

Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, you can’t ignore the facts; both IDC and Gartner are predicting huge numbers for the future of the cloud industry. A recent report by market intelligence firm IDC claims that revenue drawn from cloud computing is expected to reach $55 billion by 2014 (up from its current $16 billion), making it one of the fastest growing trends in IT. IDC also claims that on-premise IT is only moving at a 5 percent annual growth rate—in stark contrast to cloud’s 27 percent rate.

Gartner Research released its own report in late June, a day prior to the IDC report. According to the market research firm, cloud computing should reach $140 billion in global revenue by 2014.

While there is a bit of a disconnect between the two projections, one thing is for sure: the future looks bright for the cloud computing industry