Panorama Business Intelligence

Please don’t take that headline literally, it was merely a stab at making a retail pun to describe Panorama Software’s experience at last month’s BIG Show, put on for the 101st time by the National Retail Federation. Don’t worry, Panorama certainly didn’t change ownership during the four-day event at New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

What we mean is that attending the event alongside our close partners Microsoft and retail solutions provider ITR Software gave us the opportunity spread the word about the benefits of Business Intelligence 3.0 and further tout our cutting-edge BI offering – Necto.

Just ask our CEO, Eynav Azarya, about the BIG fun we had at the BIG Show – OK, no more puns.

“We were ecstatic to have been invited to participate in the Microsoft booth at NRF and were very pleased with the results,” he said. “With the traffic generated to our pod and the joint meetings with Microsoft, not only were we able to showcase our joint offering but we have also added a number of customers to our pipeline – with one customer already quickly moving to the proof of concept stage.”

The show also bolstered our already tight-knit affiliation with Microsoft.

“The partnership between Microsoft and Panorama has always been fruitful and NRF 2012 is another excellent example of the success we can achieve when collaborating,” Azarya added.

In an industry so marked by change during the past several years – in terms of shopping and spending habits as well as demand for certain products (Who doesn’t own a smartphone these days?) – real-time insight into these trends can’t be more beneficial. By analyzing your stored customer, sales and product data, your company will be better prepared to know exactly what consumers are looking for and how they go about purchasing goods.

And these capabilities will be bolstered even further with the next-generation functionality we’ve built into Necto. Adding in social aspects and relevancy means that end users can collaborate and drive greater value out of information, while being presented with all the data that is necessary for their responsibilities and job functions.

So give Necto a try to see what it can do to grow your business. After all, you don’t want to sell yourself short (couldn’t help the pun). Download a free version of Necto at http://www.panorama.com/trial/necto-trial-1.php.

Boosting the productivity of a company’s workforce by promoting collaborative technologies, including social business intelligence, will be key to fueling business growth during the coming years, according to chief information officers responding to a recent CIO magazine poll.

In determining CIO priorities for this year and those to follow, the survey revealed that collaboration is high on the list. In fact, 67 percent of respondents said improving employee productivity will be a top business accomplishment in 2011. One way to do so is through the use of social business intelligence, according to one executive’s comments.
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Businesses’ need for scalable, well-performing warehouse platforms is driven by market challenges including the enormous growth of data, the need for real-time access, and the ability to instantly generate business insight in order to compete better.

With its Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Microsoft is changing the name of the game by releasing a high-end, mission critical product with around a million dollar SKU. The customer market is anxious to see the benefits of the Microsoft solution, which is based on a product they purchased two years ago from Data Allegro previously known as Project Madison for the last two years.

Microsoft typically plays at the lower end of the market, always trying to compete on pricing and catering to the masses. It’s an interesting move, considering you can buy a SQL Server for less than $25K or even have an express version for free. It’s also a very competitive battlefield where Oracle, IBM and Teradata have been active for many years.
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Many companies are turning to social business intelligence to cultivate ideas from employees throughout their organizations to add value to business data. But there are several necessary strategies to fulfill before a company fully enables collaborative technology, according to a recent Information Management report.

“To truly enable collaborative BI, information delivery and the tools used to visualize, analyze and share corporate data need to be developed with the end user and his or her personal workflow processes and communication inclinations in mind from the start,” Information Management contends.
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As a strategic partner of Microsoft, Panorama has been developing powerful business intelligence solutions for the Microsoft platform for the past 15 years. Through our trusted partnership, we were the first to jump at the opportunity to extend Microsoft’s new in-memory platform – SQL Server 2008 R2 (including Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot). We’ve been working very closely with the Microsoft team for the past 12 months to ensure we deliver value and enhance this new platform with more advanced analytics, easy-to-create operational dashboards and data level security – all to make it enterprise-ready.

To learn more about how you as a Microsoft partner can succeed extending the value of this platform to your customers, read Panorama and Microsoft success story

We very much enjoy our close relationship with Microsoft and we’re looking forward to many years ahead of working together to deliver the tools customers need to make better informed business decisions!

Operational risk management is becoming a critical business intelligence initiative for the retail banking industry, offering enterprise-wide access to information and allowing executives to focus on their business objectives.

Emerging threats facing this heavily regulated industry have created a growing demand for business intelligence software. As a competitive, heavily regulated industry, some retail banking organizations miss out on business opportunities by devoting resources to crisis management and banking compliance, rather than strategic planning and capital management.
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More than any other business driver, competition characterizes the retail industry. Globalization, deflation, diversification of sales channels and, most of all, changing customer demands have merged to create a cutthroat environment in which retailers struggle to turn a profit.

These profitability challenges involve both revenue and cost. Sales remain flat with many companies not understanding customer behavior and buying habits well enough to make the right decisions about product, price, promotion and placement. And without the ability to explore every facet of the organization across business units and geographies, it can be a struggle to understand and manage the costs required to do business.
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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