Panorama Business Intelligence

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.

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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…

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Robert Scoble interviews Oudi Antebi of Panorama Software:

“In addition to the interview I did yesterday with socialtext, which explores some of the disruption coming to enterprises, there’s another trend I’m tracking: the coming fight between the collaborative web and Microsoft.Now some pundits in the industry think that the fight will be head on. Not me. I think it’ll be more parasitic. Like how mold takes over a strawberry. Slow, but in the end the strawberry dies.Is that what we’re seeing now? Well, here’s something that is a small piece of the bigger trend. You could call it a few cells of mold on the strawberry, if you’d like.What is it? Panorama Software for Google Apps. I shot two videos with Oudi Antebi, VP of marketing and strategy of Panorama Software. Never heard of them? Neither had I, but what they are doing is very disruptive to bigger companies:

Part I. Where we discover what is happening in the Business Intelligence space and learn what Panorama Software is doing. (This video is embedded above).
Part II. Demo of how the Panorama gadget is used to display real-time data.”

Read full blog post: http://scobleizer.com/2008/12/31/the-story-of-2009-enterprise-disruption/

 

 

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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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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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.”

Today we announced the joint release of our first analytical solution for Google apps and Docs.

To get the latest on this initiative you can subscribe to our blog http://google-pivot-tables.blogspot.com/
we are looking forward to hearing your feedback about our first release.

When examining the evolution of the BI industry, it is shockingly paradoxical.  With a vision of helping organizations gain more actionable insight, BI companies have developed a myriad of tools focused on slicing and dicing data and building reports.  But those tools have only benefited 20% of the users who actually leverage BI for business results.

In developing solutions, most BI providers have overlooked the needs of the one group of stakeholders that can actually benefit the most from the potential of information insight.  And that’s the Information Worker.  Existing solutions are complex.  So much so that the Information Worker is forced to work around that complexity and fit the solutions to his or her needs.

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More and more BI articles and blogs address the importance of powerful exception management capabilities to ensure users don’t get overwhelmed by BI data and make it usable in a powerful way. In this post about how to move from information to intelligence the writer talks about how important and how powerful it is to add process data into BI but makes a comment that the only way to make this effective is by adding powerful exception handling capabilities.
 

                “The detection of changes taking place that affect business – especially those changes that cost the business the most, namely the breakdown of processes due to exceptions – and particularly at an early, pre-critical stage, is just the type of information that becomes ‘timely intelligence.’ Understanding change within the organization requires having a memory of norms, and triggering when thresholds are violated.”

One of the biggest issues in BI today is the inability of information workers to Focus on the Relevant data out of the oceans of data they get exposed to in forms of reports and spreadsheets.

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We all keep reading about how BI vendors  have ‘cracked to code’ of making  BI really pervasive – “BI for the masses”. I just read this post from Shawn Rogers that talks about that.

When I look at the last 30 years of BI, what I see is mostly evolution on the back end. Most of what changed in the last 30 years from a BI perspective is just better, simpler, cheaper ways of building reports out of operational data. Data today is much cleaner and much (MUCH) more available for report / analytical view creation.

But did that really make an impact on usage of BI by the masses or did it simplify the work of those that used analytics and reports anyhow? Is BI pervasive just because it is so easy for IT and analysts to build reports? Has the fact that Excel is 50% cheaper than a pure play BI solution made a real BI adoption difference? Is BI, from an end user perspective, all that difference?

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