Panorama Business Intelligence

An interesting review of Panorama for PowerPivot / SharePoint 2010 from Ella Maschiach’s BI Blog:

A while ago, I saw Panorama was advertising a webcast detailing how Panorama gives a complete solution for the entire Microsoft BI platform, including PowerPivot. I have to admit, just seeing Panorama and PowerPivot in the same sentence seemed odd to me, as PowerPivot seemed like a completely full solution for its purpose. I didn’t see what Panorama had to add to the equation. And so I began asking Panorama a few questions…

So where does Panorama offer any added value?

Well, if your organization is considering using SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition along with PowerPivot. If you are going to deploy your PowerPivot workbooks to SharePoint 2010, and you’d like to look at them on the SharePoint platform (and not download it to your desktop), then you’ll probably be using Excel Services . This would probably be the case if your organization hasn’t moved completely to Office 2010. For instance, your organization may decide to integrate Office 2010 on the IT department workers desktops first and only later move the rest of the organization to Office 2010. Actually, something similar happened in the municipality with Office 2007 and so, I know that can and will happen…

Read more on Ella Maschiach’s BI Blog

Panorama Software’s thought leadership article featured in Microsoft Momentum Magazine:

We’ve all heard the industry call: “Let’s get BI on every desktop.” Managers everywhere have been transfixed on putting more relevant data in the hands of information workers because they know that the right facts and data empower users to make impactful decisions with positive results. To do this, they must have access to analytical tools to interact with data in a more meaningful way.

As the first phase of bringing BI to the masses, canned reports with data extracted from line-of-business systems have had some success. Today’s information worker uses reports to create a snapshot of aggregated data that gives them the initial information to do their jobs correctly.

Sadly, many businesses never realize the full potential of the rich data collected by business intelligence software, for the simple reason that a typical user can’t make heads or tails of it. If more BI vendors realized this, the whole concept of business intelligence wouldn’t have come under so much scrutiny over the years.

Microsoft is pulling through in the clutch. MS Office is one of the most widely used tools in the world and enables users to perform analysis and generate key insights for their businesses. Microsoft has taken an open approach, allowing third-party contributors to extend and build on top of the Office platform, taking the innovation to the next level.
(more…)

Today’s software industry buzzword is “Cloud.” We all know what it is, and some of us are already leveraging Cloud platforms to reduce resource consumption on-premise. Right now, many ISVs are making a black-and-white distinction between Cloud and on-premise platforms. When you’re evaluating software platforms, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground because many providers are exclusively leveraging either one or the other.

The problem facing most of us as technology managers is whether Cloud or on-premise makes the most sense for our businesses. Because there are strategic benefits to both, the decision can be a struggle. But what CIOs should know is that you truly don’t need to make a clear-cut decision for your business. Implementing platforms both in the Cloud and on-premise is a great way to play to multiple aspects of your business while enjoying the benefits that each strategy has to offer.

Read full article from the CIO Update: How Cloud and On-Premise Platforms Work Together

…And the battle rages on. Cloud or on-premise business intelligence? Cloud is the hot new strategy, has a lower overhead and leverages out-of-the-box functionality for quick implementation on new data warehouses, applications and departments and for new users. However, a lot of companies want to keep BI activities on-premise because of the costs and time associated with moving high volumes of data—like entire data warehouses or data-marts—to the cloud in order to realize the advantages of SaaS deployment. This polar dynamic has kept companies in the dark on one simple fact: combining the two platforms offers you the rich benefits of both worlds.

You can build a hybrid solution ad-hoc, leverage one of the few early adopters of hybrid BI, or call on your ISV to adopt a more dynamic strategy—but, however it’s done, it’ll be crucial that your business leverages a combination cloud and on-premise business intelligence in the coming years.

How does it work?
(more…)

Microsoft’s “Project Gemini” has finally materialized into something solid and extremely powerful: PowerPivot for Excel 2010. Information workers that love Excel can build powerful analytical applications and organize millions of rows of data into a workbook for simple sharing and collaboration with other team members. This is a huge step for Microsoft—one that greatly benefits independent software vendors (ISVs).

PowerPivot is unique in that it puts BI at the fingertips of business users while offering better visibility for management and monitoring of collaboration using Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 based management tools. Its applications for Excel 2010 generate faster insights and better decision-making for business users.

But there’s even bigger news about PowerPivot: the platform will offer new opportunities to third-party BI ISVs to break new, undiscovered ground with their solutions. As an example, Panorama NovaView’s next major release will build on PowerPivot’s in-memory data engine and extend the Excel functionality. This will enable users to perform advanced analysis through the browser as well as build models from any data source using a simple wizard.

Here at Panorama, we’re rooting for the PowerPivot team (a couple of them are former Panoramies) in their quest to perfect one of the best inventions developed for the BI space over the last few years.

Self-service has always been an important factor in the business intelligence community. But in today’s BI world, most companies limit their users to create their own self-service reports on top of pre-defined, pre-modeled data. The self-service capabilities are only feasible when working with such data. The real issue is that users are sometimes limited when required to work with pre-modeled data since so much data is not covered under the “Official BI data warehouse” – ultimately this leads to decisions based on incomplete research. That, coupled with the growing number of applications used by organizations today, is why it is important that your BI solution provides complete self-service capabilities that include also the ability to connect ad-hoc to any data source as well as build their own reports and navigate the data.

Self-service implies that your information workers become less reliant on the parameters the IT department sets out for your BI solution. A lot of solutions out there take a narrow view on self-service. What makes the most sense for today’s information worker is to utilize a comprehensive, end-to-end self-service approach with no IT-defined limitations.

(more…)

The battle between on-demand and on-premise business intelligence solutions is heating up. As more and more BI solutions begin offering cloud services, the question lingers: is SaaS or on-premise BI more adept at satisfying an organization’s needs?

Let’s answer that question with another question: why choose one when you can have the best of both worlds?

Every business is different: different sizes, different shapes, different business needs. The real choice shouldn’t definitively be between on-premise and cloud BI; it should be between which components of your suite run on-premise and which components run inside the cloud.

Many of today’s SaaS vendors don’t offer you the choice. Because on-demand BI is still relatively new, it has been perceived as the future of BI. Unfortunately, many SaaS vendors are leveraging the popular belief that you must choose between one or the other to push cloud services on unsuspecting businesses. The truth is you can keep the on-premise components that work best for your business while adding on-demand components that complement your BI platform.
(more…)

The last 3 years were the most important years in the Business Intelligence market. Companies were acquired and merged, BI has become a strategic initiative to most CIOs around the globe and Microsoft has decided to make BI a strategic initiative for the years to come.

At first it seemed very confusing, Proclarity was acquired, PerformancePoint was released, Proclairty was then retired as a stand alone product and PerformancePoint become a component in SharePoint as opposed to a stand alone product…

While at first glance it might have all seemed as a zigzag on the Microsoft part, it is now clear it was all part of a well defined strategy lead by some of the smartest people in the BI space.

So why will Microsoft win? Because of 2 main reasons:
(more…)

Social media has fired the first shots of an information revolution. MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have changed the way we network, while tools like Twitter and Yammer have introduced the roles of “content creators” and “followers.”

The rate at which information consumption has evolved is really astounding. This April alone, Twitter estimated more than 17 million unique US visitors. The same month, Facebook reported 200 million active users – only three months after reaching the 150 million mark. Factoring in blogs, wikis, podcasts and other social media outlets, the amount of businesses and consumers that companies are actively engaging is through the roof.

The emergence of social media has laid the groundwork for anyone to publish thoughts, ideas and information and share that content instantaneously with the rest of the web. Because social media is inherently simple to manipulate, it is quickly becoming the preferred way to consume information.

We’ve already begun using these platforms for marketing, networking, content sharing and a wealth of other purposes. In a world where Business Intelligence tools are still used primarily by few power users in the organization, it seems that extending the reach of insights through social media is the right way to go.

(more…)

Many companies strive to become “flat organization” where senior management is connected to employees, giving them the ability to act and react much faster in a much more agile way.

Wikipedia defines: Flat organization (known as horizontal organization) refers to an organizational structure with few or no levels of intervening management between staff and managers. The idea is that well-trained workers will be more productive when they are more directly involved in the decision making process, rather than closely supervised by many layers of management.

The flat organization model promotes employee involvement through a decentralized decision making process. By elevating the level of responsibility of baseline employees, and by eliminating layers of middle management, comments and feedback reach all personnel involved in decisions more quickly. Expected response to customer feedback can thus become more rapid. Since the interaction between workers is more frequent, this organizational structure generally depends upon a much more personal relationship between workers and managers. Hence the structure can be more time-consuming to build than a traditional bureaucratic/hierarchical model.

Unfortunately, the flat organization concept has had only limited success so far. The main reasons are that this structure is generally possible only in smaller organizations or individual units within larger organizations. When they reach a critical size, organizations can retain a streamlined structure but cannot keep a completely flat manager-to-staff relationship without impacting productivity. Certain financial responsibilities may also require a more conventional structure. Some theorize that flat organizations become more traditionally hierarchical when they begin to be geared towards productivity. So in other words, employees just don’t have that ability today to communicate directly with executives in an agile and direct way that will make the vision of a flat organization work.

Or should I say until now…

(more…)