As a close partner of Microsoft, we’ll demonstrate how SQL Server 2012 will benefit users of business intelligence solutions such as our innovative Necto product. Necto analytics allows enterprise users to receive the full power and value of SQL 2012.

Working on both MDX and DAX languages, Necto can handle the combination of both organizational OLAP data and in-memory user data with seamless migrations. Complex enterprises with multiple data sources can utilize Necto as a connection point to develop broader insights, which are all viewable in a web-based workboard.

The Necto BI platform is fully interoperable with all versions of SQL Server, and does not require any staff retraining or installations. This will also ease the migration for Necto users that wish to upgrade to SQL 2012 from a previous version. Most importantly, the intuitive Necto UI does not require training and encourages broad adoption across multiple business units.

Titled the New World of Data with SQL Server 2012, the online launch event will reveal how SQL 2012 enables mission-critical confidence, blazing fast performance and vibrant data visualization capabilities. All are important to the modern organization that leverages business intelligence.

Data is now king, and SQL 2012 will give you the ability to corral exploding information volumes and utilize its value and insights like never before!

Keynote speakers for the invent include Ted Kummert, the vice president of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, and Quinton Clark, the company’s Database Systems Group vice president.

Register online at Microsoft’s dedicated product launch website to take part in this monumental event: http://www.sqlserverlaunch.com/ww/Home.

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.

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.

Speaking about his company’s shift to collaborative technologies, supermarket chain Supervalu CIO Wayne Shurts said “speed is becoming incredibly important and some of our processes weren’t built for speed.”

Social business intelligence allows employees to collaborate on analyzing and formulating ideas based on the company’s business data.

Collaboration is viewed as a key innovation for business intelligence. While identifying analytics as a technology that will reach mainstream status this year, research firm IDC also predicted new developments for social business software, which includes social business intelligence solutions.

Learn more about Social Business Intelligence

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.

What pushed Microsoft to this move? Did the market ask for it?

We see an enormous growth of data in the marketplace across all sectors. According to Gartner, the amount of enterprise data is doubling almost every year, placing significant pressure on organizations to store and analyze the data and use it to drive competitive value. Additionally, “real time” is becoming more important for many industries. Real-time access to data helps organizations compete by resolving questions quickly, allowing on the fly changes, and providing an analysis of customer churn.

Since we announced our support for the PDW, we received many inquiries from our enterprise customers with demand mostly coming from data hungry industries such as financial services, gaming, telco and even some government organizations that are evaluating the product.

What’s the Microsoft strategy?

Microsoft’s out of the box solution will not be less than $800K, which also requires HP servers and software. It’s very similar to how Oracle and Teradata are pricing their applications.

PDW is proven as a solid technology platform that runs mission critical applications, performs fast complex queries, and is massively scalable. It is 10 to 20 times faster than other SQL Servers, and can be run as a 30 or 60 nods system, each with its own storage, memory, management, and CPU, all of which create scale. So interestingly enough, Microsoft is focusing on capability, scalability, and performance, not pricing, which is a significant departure from its usual model.

But Microsoft is not jumping into this high end market alone – it’s aligning with HP

From a go-to-market perspective, Microsoft made a very smart move by launching the PDW together with HP, which has success with its own high-end data warehouse named Neoview. HP is putting that product aside and launching its hardware and software with the PDW application for Microsoft. So Microsoft can now leverage HP’s sales people to sell the high-end solution to enterprise customers.

The competitive market reaction to the announcement is interesting, with Oracle ramping up discussion of its Exadata product. Oracle recognizes HP and Microsoft are allocating substantial resources into the PDW. It will be very interesting to watch this competition unfold, and see how this higher-priced Microsoft product performs in a ready marketplace.

“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.

This is achieved through careful investigation and planning before a company implements social business intelligence analytics.

First, a company must unite the IT department with less technically savvy business users. Bringing these different employees together will promote the kind of collaborative environment needed to make social BI work properly. According to the report, it is the responsibility of senior leadership to bring these groups together in creating “an information-driven culture and prioritizing the importance of data-driven decision-making.”

However, to do this, business users must first be brought into the fold. Through a self-service BI model, companies must educate employees to produce an understanding of the type of functionality they require to get the most out of a BI solution.

“The key to success begins with user engagement; interview users about their needs in order to gain insight into what types of tools they need to be more efficient,” the report suggests.

Finally, to get the most out of social BI, companies must have better decision-making with a cross-functional approach. Just like businesses not wanting their data in a silo, decisions should come from a number of different departments since decisions made from BI may affect more than one area of a company. This will allow users who see trends across several business functions to share their ideas that may be beneficial to the company.

In times of lean budgets and sometimes leaner staff numbers, companies are constantly looking for ways to improve, and collaboration is proving to be a useful tool. According to Forbes, companies can use social BI to eradicate a so-called cognitive bias or the idea that one person knows what’s best for the entire organization.

Read more Business Intelligence Industry News

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!

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.

As a result, many retail banking institutions face challenges in collecting, managing and reporting operational risk events, especially as complex information from loans, cash balances, credit and liquidity further complicate the process.

In response, successful retail banking organizations have integrated business intelligence software for their operational risk management initiatives. A secure business intelligence solution allows every level of an organization to access real-time information, managing risk by providing every employee with information that employees require to realize the impact of their organizations’ transactions and operations. Also, many organizations in the industry have reduced costs by consolidating reporting and analysis onto one platform, enabling every employee to complete their own analysis of corporate data.

As further regulations on banking continue to make the industry more competitive, retail banking organizations may continue to pursue dynamic business intelligence software to streamline their operational risk management processes.

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.

In the old millennium, product and service were prime competitive differentiators. Excellence in products and service is still essential, of course, but such attributes tend to only be differentiators for short windows of time before competitors catch up. The only enduring way to stand apart is to have better information ? the critical ingredient that enables a retailer to outmaneuver the competition through a continuing flow of renewal and innovation. That means an enterprise’s information management strategy can either be its most compelling asset or its most limiting deficit.

In a mobile society with a diverse customer base, retailers require daily or even real-time information to act on customer needs quickly. Retailers can no longer gain essential intelligence by capturing information in monthly or weekly reports like they did ten — or even five — years ago. Today, customer needs are not easily detectable, nor are sales peaks and dips so easily predictable. To maintain productivity and profitability, enterprises must leverage data and information as never before in order to plan and analyze operations, discern shifting market demands, collaborate with suppliers, and track consumer trends.

In response, leading retailers around the globe are redefining the way they do business with their customers. Utilizing innovative new technologies, they are finding new ways to understand market trends, new avenues for meeting consumer needs and preferences, and new opportunities to tailor each shopping experience to match the expectations of every individual customer.

Join us for a webinar to learn how a Business Intelligence solution can help you:
• integrate disparate infrastructure and applications across the enterprise;
• empower employees to make fast decisions;
• improve the transactional and informational flow;
• streamline operations at both corporate and factory levels.

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“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

“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