Panorama Business Intelligence

In the past year I‘ve been exposed to a world that I knew very little about, the world of Google. Sure, just like everyone else around me, I knew that Google is great as a search engine and has also gotten into Apps but I never really understood the full potential in that thing known as “the Google platform”.

After a year that saw us become partners with Google and where we developed some very interested stuff with the industry giant, I came to realize there is a whole lot more to Google than one might realize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the more interesting angles from my personal perspective is the iGoogle platform. I use iGoogle mostly to place, on a single screen, my Gmail, Google Calendar, weather, news and some other personal stuff and find it very useful. The big moment of clarity came when I participated in a customer meeting and they shared with me how they were thinking about creating an iGoogle-like solution to compliment SAP Portal.

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The word of business intelligence could provide the perfect playground for Microsoft and Google to work together, providing a joint solution.

Even though many of us would be reluctant to admit it, we all love watching a great battle.  There is something about witnessing to two opposing sides combating to the bitter end.  Whether it’s the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, Obama vs. Clinton or even those two maniacs pulled over on the side of the road engaging in fisticuffs, consumed with road rage, we crane our necks to get a good eye-full of the action!  It is with the same excitement that the Microsoft vs. Google story has remained high on the interest level of both consumers and corporations. 

Many in the analyst and media communities thrive on focusing on the attention-grabbing element of this “presumable” battle between the Redmond and Mountain View-based companies, especially in the realm of their respective productivity suite offerings.  Microsoft Office and Google Apps, when stacked up side-by-side are actually two very different beasts.  Google has taken the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) approach to their offering and Microsoft has stayed true to its on-premise software.

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New PowerApps Platform Gives Enterprises, ISVs and Developers a Cost-Effective Way to Power Business Intelligence Applications Via the Web

TORONTO, ON – (June 4th, 2008) – Panorama Software, a global leader in Proactive Business Intelligence solutions, today officially announced its PowerApps™ strategy, a cloud computing analytical engine for Business Intelligence (BI) applications. Through PowerApps, ISVs and software developers can now take advantage of the first “Analytics as a Service” platform to develop and extend various analytical applications using the power of cloud computing.

PowerApps is a Web-based, hosted and extremely efficient OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) platform that cancreate, manage and support any type of analysis scenario. The platform offers APIs to create OLAP cubes as well as to deliver and create customized, user-facing reports from within Google Appsâ„¢.

PowerApps is the analytical engine powering Panorama’s analytical solution for Google Docs™.For more information please visit: www.panorama.com/google/.

“Cloud computing challenges the rules and commercial model of the software platform vendors, and is a significant major trend in the software world,” said Gerry Brown, Associate Analyst with Bloor Research International. “Panorama’s PowerApps delivers analytics as a service, and joins solutions such as Amazon® S3 and the Google BigTable in offering a differentiated cost-effective alternative solution to those of the traditional platform providers.”

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First it was the blog world that was buzzing about Panorama’s initiative with Google and now analysts are turning their attention to the unique offering by Panorama and Google.

Aberdeen Group, a leading provider of fact-based research focused on the global technology-driven value chain, issued a “Market Alert” yesterday offering an interesting opinion about the Panorama/Google solution.

Read it hear – http://www.aberdeen.com/launch/report/market_alert/5173-MA-panorama-google-business-intelligence.asp

 

The world of Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly attractive for many businesses as companies look for viable options other than continuously investing money into buying software that needs to be installed and maintained in-house .  Not only is SaaS becoming a viable option, it is also becoming a feasible alternative, in many cases, to traditional application software vendors.  There are numerous reasons that can help explain this phenomenon.  On the IT side of the equation, most CIOs are always on the lookout for ideal application delivery options and the ability to dramatically reduce large amounts of their budgets spent on IT-related administration and support is a very attractive proposition.  Furthermore, the cost of staffing and increasing IT-complexity makes a SaaS-based approach very appealing. On the business side of the equation, there are many cases where buying a service helps reduce the burden from IT when there is a need for a new solution to support the business.  

A great example of a SaaS-based solution is Google Apps.  Google’s solution compels companies to ask themselves why they would install a productivity suite when they could just use it as a set of services.  The uptake on Google Apps has been tremendous and the potential for both improvement and growth can be seen (500,000 companies currently using it worldwide with 3,000 added every day).  Another example of a remarkable SaaS-based solution is Salesforce.com. With one million users, their value proposition is based on the fact that an organization need not purchase and install a cumbersome CRM system that will cost a fortune to maintain.  Rather, use it as a service and keep your headaches to a minimum!

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While Gartner and other BI analysts and experts have recognized the magnitude and impact of Google and Panorama’s partnership on the BI world, some others are still a bit confused as to the meaning of this new development.

Let me try to explain why we have made such a significant bet on being the company that powers Google Apps and Google Docs with BI.

If you ask common business people if they perform BI (most will not even know what that means unless you ask about “analysis and reporting”), 90% will answer “sure I do, I use Excel”.

The sad reality (sad for us BI companies) is that we (BI companies) only deal with 10% of the population – the “Power users”, while 90% perform their reporting and analytics inside spreadsheet applications. It’s true, the numbers are changing and more people use BI tools but the ratio compared to spreadsheet is still very VERY low.

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As promised, we released the first enterprise extension for Panorama Analytics for Google Docs in the form of SQL Server Analysis Services support. In the following days we are accepting new users by registration on our web site www.panorama.com/google/ssas but in the next couple of weeks this will open up for the masses.

We’ve seen a very large amount of registrations since we announced on Thursday and expect to respond to all our users in the next couple of days.  We thank everyone for their patience. 

Many have emailed me asking about our plans for the product with Google.   Well, we have a long list of systems and platforms we plan to support in the coming months with a goal of making the experience of using Google spreadsheets and other Google applications (such as iGoogle for dashboarding) a very powerful experience.   I can’t disclose the exact plans yet but whether you use SAP or a SaaS based solution, you should expect to get some powerful functionality right from within Google Docs.

So why did we start with SQL Server Analysis Services?  For two main reasons: (1) we got feedback from our existing customers who wanted to get a powerful extranet, collaborative solution for BI while using  their existing BI data infrastructure and (2) it is the most popular data source (outside of spreadsheets themselves) for analysis using Pivot Table functionality.

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New Support for SQL Server^TM Analysis Services Allows Enterprise Customers to Use
Google Docs to Analyze, Report, Visualize Their Corporate Data

Fresh from announcing their addition of Business Intelligence (BI) to Google Docs, Panorama Software, a global leader in Proactive Business Intelligence, has revealed a new solution for the enterprise level market.  The beta version of its newly developed functionality for Google Docs will allow the support of its first enterprise data source – Microsoft SQL Server^TM Analysis Services, the most pervasive OLAP solution in the industry.   This is the first of what will be many enhancements and new functionalities that Panorama will roll out for Google Docs in the next few months.

Microsoft Excel has been known to be the only spreadsheet tool capable of providing BI capabilities in the form of analytics and reporting for enterprise level data.  By adding support for SQL Server^TM Analysis Services, enterprise companies can now use Google Docs, the most powerful Software as a Service (SaaS) based spreadsheet in the world with its strong collaborative capabilities, to get more out of their enterprise data in new and flexible ways.

Companies have long wanted a fresh way to analyze corporate data using a spreadsheet application, while also enjoying advanced collaboration, mobility and access-from-anywhere functionalities.  With the new support for SQL Server^TM Analysis Services by Google Docs with Panorama Analytics, enterprise customers have exactly what they have been asking for.

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Today Nigel published is report on the new strategic direction Panorama is taking. You can read the full report here: http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_Panorama_Google.htm

 

Here are a couple of quotes:

“Google takes its first step into the OLAP world by partnering with the same company that helped Microsoft’s entry a decade earlier…”

 

“Formed in 1994, Panorama is now one of the longer-lived small, independent vendors in the OLAP world — but unlike others, its survival has not been based on hiding in a specialist niche. We have tracked the company since mid-1996 (well before most analysts) and have observed the remarkable influence on the industry it has had since then….”

 

On PowerApps: “Behind the simple pivot table interface is rather more OLAP technology than might be expected. As the Google spreadsheet is Web-based, Panorama cannot use the RAM on the client machine to cache the multidimensional data, which is of course what Excel does with local PivotTables. Instead, Panorama uses an undisclosed proprietary OLAP server to do the job, generating server cubes on-the-fly from the data in the users’ spreadsheets. This cube-creation process does cause a delay of at least 10 to 15 seconds (more with larger cubes), and screen refresh after any user action also takes several seconds, so the user experience is not nearly as slick as in Excel.”

A lot has been said and mentioned on our recent announcements about our new platform and BI applications in Google apps. Some very smart people have written some very interesting blogs. there are probably dozens of blog posts out there but I selected my personal favorits.

Stay tuned for more announcements from our side in the next few weeks

http://bobjblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/google-working-with-panorama/

http://www.biguru-online.com/2008/03/28/google-bi/

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single10597

http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/03/27/why-microsoft-might-bid-for-bi.aspx

http://performanceguys.blogspot.com/2008/03/panorama-and-google-apps-end-of.html

http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!1664.entry