Panorama Business Intelligence

Our friends at Microsoft have long topped the content management and collaboration market with their wildly popular SharePoint solution. As a single platform for structured and unstructured data, SharePoint has been a favorite of companies looking for a tool that can help them both get organized and promote a team-first environment.

So it’s easy for you to see why Panorama Software is excited about its latest endeavor.

We recently announced enhanced integration between the cutting edge Necto business intelligence solution with SharePoint. Necto and Sharepoint are the peanut butter and jelly duo in the collaborative & Social BI space.

The collaborative capabilities of SharePoint are combined with the social aspects of Necto, and hat you get is the sleek and user-friendly interface of Necto combined with the heavy-hitting content management power of SharePoint.

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The world around us is inevitably becoming more pertinent. Even big companies like Google are striving to provide users with the most relevant information in order to avoid the messy alternative that comes with large volumes of information. Finding and retrieving relevant information is becoming increasingly difficult in the age we live in, as information is being created at exponential rates.

I remember when its convenience first made Google so famous. Google easily dominated the market by providing people with the most relevant information according to their needs and in a matter of minutes. Previously, the alternative was searching for information in huge archives such as a library.

Likewise, business intelligence has become a valuable asset for organizations as it also provides information and insight from stored data. Such capabilities are essential because highly relevant insights are needed for companies to make better strategic decisions to run their business.

Today BI platforms are no longer limited by the technology assets, like physical memory. Nowadays the possibilities are endless. From this, however, arose a new problem. Companies are struggling to separate and identify which insights are key to their business, due to the high volumes of information stored by companies. BI industry experts are saying this is the major problem, and we need to fix it.
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Days of thinking led me to write this post. Are technology issues really what are preventing people from using business intelligence for real-time and better decision-making? Are the limits of technology the major issue?
The answer to both is a definite no.

Of course, these limitations have played a huge role, but technology is evolving fast and now there are numerous tools available that allow companies to pull insights from enormous amounts of data.

For a long time, we were trying to find how to make BI work for organizations in way, that will allow for a wide adoption. With the invention of Necto, which is the first Business Intelligence 3.0 enabled suite, we finally nailed it. The main problem wasn’t the technology, it was always a question of how to organize all information inside and outside (data flows) the BI system in a way that allows people to use it without costing businesses an arm and a leg.

Here’s the thing – data means nothing until it’s translated into information. That’s the purpose of BI and why it originally failed to deliver on its promised value. Making information – whether it’s a dashboard, visualization or KPI – digestible for all users within a company is difficult.
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Meetings are a necessary yet tedious part of everyone’s work day. No one, myself included, enjoys spending hours on end in the board room only to later return to a backlog of 20 emails and a stack of paper 6-inches thick.

While meetings are the age-old collaboration practice of just about every company, they can also effectively bring productivity to a screeching halt. They take time away from many tasks in order to focus on just one.

Such issues were addressed in a terrific podcast I recently came across entitled Read This Before Our Next Meeting. The premise of the podcast is based on the book of the same name by Al Pittampalli. In short, both address how disruptive meetings have become to daily operations.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. We believe that, through business intelligence and synchronized employees, companies will have a better means for gathering ideas, while still getting work done efficiently. It’s my belief that all of this can be accomplished with the help of business intelligence 3.0.

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Panorama Software recently did its best rock ‘n roll impersonation and ventured out on a world tour to spread the word about our revolutionary solution, Panorama Necto. Okay, so our trips through the U.K., Germany, and Singapore may have been different than those of the Rolling Stones, but the Panorama Necto roadshow still gave us a great opportunity to connect with the many organizations we regularly rely on.

It’s always great to host workshops with our partner community. From all that we’ve heard at the various seminars we’ve hosted recently, Panorama’s partners are both excited about the future of BI technology and eager to learn more about how it can help foster better decision-making and accelerate business growth.

On August 4, we hosted the Future of Information Management – Mobile BI and the Cloud. Focused on the hottest trends in BI right now – the spread of mobile devices and managed services is creating the desire among users to gain access to BI reports anytime and anywhere.

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Traditional business intelligence has been criticized as ineffective due to its clunky nature and reliance on IT and analysts. Luckily for companies looking to leverage their stored business data to make better decisions, the next-generation of business intelligence technology is none of these things.

Dubbed Business Intelligence 3.0, Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus recently hosted a webinar with Panorama Software to discuss the next generation of Business Intelligence solutions.

“IT is starting to turn into a bottleneck in the flow of intelligence. And users are getting frustrated because accessing necessary content is difficult, because it takes a while to discover new sources and import that information into your data warehouse,” Kobielus said during the webinar.

With BI 3.0, he said, the goal is to empower end-users, unlike traditional analytics models where business managers in need of data reports are fully reliant on the IT department. That’s because next-generation BI is built on three main tenets – Self-Service, Relevant and Social.

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The recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, held in Los Angeles last week, was a huge event for us here at Panorama Software. In addition to celebrating and reaffirming our continued partnership with Microsoft, we hosted a session of our own and had the honor of presenting at two others (click here to view the presentation archive).

The conference gave us another chance to demonstrate the cutting edge of business intelligence technology – Panorama Necto – in the Microsoft Expo Hall Theater. The solution was front and center during our discussion session, where we outlined the benefits of social business intelligence and how it will factor into the future of making better decisions.

As guest speakers, we presented at two other sessions focused on how business intelligence can help small- and medium-sized businesses grow and the importance of a strong SQL Server offering for cloud-based business. At these events Panorama did what it does best – promote the benefits of business intelligence.

Discussions at the sessions ranged from how SMBs can leverage their business data to what’s in store next for Microsoft’s SQL Server and how it will affect the future of the cloud.

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After years of minor, incremental advances in how we perceive and use BI, we are now witnessing a resurgence in the way we utilize BI in organizations. This is often dubbed “BI 3.0″ – the new generation of BI solutions.

Initially, BI – or, more accurately, BI 1.0 – was about how to present data. As users, we were mainly focused on how to best store our ever-escalating amounts of data, and how to enable know-how specialists (aka BI analysts) to sift through it so they can provide management with valuable information for decision-making..

Utilization of computer tools for business users and managers alike proliferated in the years since. Managers were not content with receiving information weeks after the fact and wanted to know what happens in real time. For this reason, BI 2.0 was introduced. It brought us new tools such as Dashboards, KPIs and Scorecards, and moved us slightly away from looking at the actual data. It allowed us to give users just the information that is interesting to them, but only if it is predefined (aka hardcoded).

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Mobile has joined SaaS business intelligence and social business intelligence as the future of analytics technology. Given the rise of mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, decision-makers now want access to the same insightful data reports they regularly use on their desktop machines.

A recent Dashboard Insight report dug deeper into the popularity surrounding mobile business intelligence and revealed several trends within the sector that are driving greater adoption and use of the technology.

“Over the past several years solution providers have placed a lot of effort into developing interactive mobile applications that can be used by decision makers on the road,” Leslie Wise, the president and founder of consulting firm WiseAnalytics, wrote for Dashboard Insight. “Although it has been a slow road to broad adoption, mobile BI is finally starting to make inroads into the general business intelligence marketplace.”

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The High Tech Industry Association, an influential Israeli organization, recently invited top technology executives from across the world to participate in its HTIA 2011 Annual Conference in Jerusalem. I was grateful to be invited to share the stage among other top leaders and discuss Panorama’s approach to the future of the business intelligence field.

At the event, we were also treated to speeches and discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, other government ministry heads and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, as well as many other technology leaders. When given my own opportunity to speak to those gathered, I focused on Panorama Software’s innovative new offering, Panorama Necto.

Panorama Necto is a revolutionary application that we believe will take social business software to the next level. Our new solution goes above and beyond the capabilities of anything that is currently on the market.
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