“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

What an ideal situation for the CIO — customers who want more and more. But the fact of life is that the demand for more analytics places CIOs in a tough spot.

Traditionally, in order to provide fast responses to almost random questions coming from various users, the CIO had to set up a data warehouse (or at least a data mart), define the parameters that are relevant to the business users, define the metrics they wish to measure, and create a “Cube” — a multidimensional data warehouse with enough pre-aggregations that can provide complex responses at lightning speed. The process just described requires professional skills, server capacity and processes. So as more and more users queued up to get their analytics done, CIOs found it hard to deliver so many solutions concurrently.

Read the full article at CIOZone: Reconciling In-Memory and Server-Based Analytics

Learn more or register >>

We’ll see you there!

Companies everywhere are realizing the savings on operational costs and hardware that cloud computing brings to the table. And yes, there are many who aren’t sold on the security the cloud offers versus the comforts of keeping data on-premise.

Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, you can’t ignore the facts; both IDC and Gartner are predicting huge numbers for the future of the cloud industry. A recent report by market intelligence firm IDC claims that revenue drawn from cloud computing is expected to reach $55 billion by 2014 (up from its current $16 billion), making it one of the fastest growing trends in IT. IDC also claims that on-premise IT is only moving at a 5 percent annual growth rate—in stark contrast to cloud’s 27 percent rate.

Gartner Research released its own report in late June, a day prior to the IDC report. According to the market research firm, cloud computing should reach $140 billion in global revenue by 2014.

While there is a bit of a disconnect between the two projections, one thing is for sure: the future looks bright for the cloud computing industry

PowerPivot, part of the SharePoint 2010 release, is a powerful in-memory engine that allows users to extract large amounts of data from multiple sources, including corporate databases, Excel spreadsheets and external sources, in a very quick & efficient way. It uses an in-memory, column-based storage to enable users to build models in self-service mode, “on the fly”, without having to pre-aggregate or build cubes prior to querying.

NovaView for PowerPivot enables users to leverage this in-memory platform and perform advanced analysis, build pixel perfect reports, create executive dashboards or share the results through SharePoint – all in a secured environment (with data level granularity) and sourcing natively from the PowerPivot platform.

Join us for a webinar, featuring a special guest – Derek Comingore, a SQL Server MVP, speaker at national SQL Server user groups and a published author on SQL Server topics. You will learn more about PowerPivot and how you can empower your users with quick, self-service BI, leveraging your existing investment in the Microsoft platform.

This webinar will showcase how you can:

- Put BI at the fingertips of business users

- Enable users to perform advanced analysis in a fully web-based environment

- Share the results and insights generated in the process with the masses

- Leverage your existing investment in SQL, Office and SharePoint in all their versions

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
10:00 AM ET / 4:00 PM CET – Europe

11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET – Americas

Wednesday July 21, 2010
9:30 AM IST / 1:00 PM KST / 2:00 PM AEST – Asia Pacific

Moreover, Microsoft brought their top people from EMEA and also from Redmond (although some got stranded because of the Volcano and the travel disruptions, but I will discuss it later).

During the summit, Microsoft shared with their partners everything about their BI strategy and Azure, helping all the ISVs plan the rest of FY10, but most importantly plan for FY11. There were couple of very interesting presentations carried by Chris Dial, Madhu Kachru and Jaime Perena, on how an ISV can leverage the Microsoft global marketing machine. It was fascinating to see how much can you get from Microsoft… to be very honest, although I am proud to be a company that knows very well how to utilize the Microsoft machine, I also found some options which I didn’t know about such as ‘video reference or quote’, etc.

As an ISV, getting the word out there, about your solution, is not an easy task, but partnering with Microsoft makes it somewhat easier.

There were fascinating presentations about Microsoft Technology roadmaps. First, I would like to discuss Azure. Michal Maggs did a very interesting presentation, but what was even more amazing, was the real commitment Microsoft put on the cloud. I have seen Microsoft speaking about it for couple of years now, but in this event, there were no questions. Microsoft is in the cloud game, and they are there to win. They have quite a good starting point, with more than 1 billion PC’s running windows and more than 500 million PC’s running Office. Their Servers and .Net is everywhere and now, they made a huge bet on the cloud (not sure that Bet is the right word here, so maybe I should say investment). Their core message was “we are all in… Cloud”. And they are. They are working hard to bring all their on-premise applications and services to the cloud, and it is very intriguing. During the breakouts I met with some executives who said, ‘as an ISV we need to focus on value to our customers, not on solving integration issues… the cloud will solve all that’.

At Panorama, as an innovator in cloud based BI, we know the drill very well – cloud helps us decrease costs, drive innovation and increase customer productivity via our applications. We believe Azure will be very attractive to our customers as well.

There were lots of discussions and presentations about SQL and BI.. Chris Dial gave his pitch and the audience loved it. SQL is not just a database anymore. Anyone who tries to compare it to mysql will find he compared Oranges to peanuts (or Champagne to water). SQL has so many attractive services that make your application shine. Many of the ISV’s wanted to hear the BI story and we were fortunate to have the opportunity to present our story as well. Since Microsoft acquired our OLAP technology, we continued to develop very innovative BI applications on the Microsoft platform. According to the recent OLAP Survey we continue to lead the market of 3rd party BI applications on this platform. During the presentation we shared how an ISV can and should extend their application with BI capabilities. Microsoft makes it very easy today, and the value for the users is enormous. (so does the revenue for the ISV).

Donald Farmer, probably the smartest and the funniest guru in Microsoft was supposed to attend in person, but poor Donald, the volcanic ash won the battle and he attended via live meeting. Donald is such a fluent speaker that even via the internet line he discussed PowerPivot with such enthusiasm that it made everyone in the room excited, wanting to try it out in that very second. There was also a demo (recorded) which was done by Amir Netz, an old friend, who presented some cool stuff done with PowerPivot. We’re proud to say that Panorama is the first and only ISV who developed an application that extends PowerPivot and makes it ‘enterprise ready’. Many of the ISVs wanted to learn more about PowerPivot, how they can develop on this new in-memory platform, and how they can take it to their customers.

A little bird whispered to me that the next summit is going to be hosted in Austria and Microsoft is going to discuss topics such as how to move applications to the cloud with Azure… how to market and sell it…. Also, many ISVs wanted more information on how to integrate BI deeper into their applications, so I assume this process will be covered as well. And last but not least, how to ride the Microsoft market beast, and leverage it to your advantage (i.e – what programs can you take advantage of…)

We are proud to announce the release of the latest version of Panorama NovaView 6.2, the first BI solution to augment the PowerPivot platform by adding more self-service BI capabilities and a missing data level security layer, making it ready for enterprise wide deployments.

Join us for a special launch event where you will learn about upgrades and new products in NovaView BI suite:

- Integration & added value to MS Office / SharePoint 2010
- Native connectivity, a data level security layer & self-service BI capabilities in PowerPivot
- Oracle relational DB support
- And much more!

Come see the new NovaView 6.2 in action and you will learn how you can:

* Use PowerPivot alongside Analysis Services to answer your known & unknown questions
* Provide advanced web-based analytics, reporting, dashboards & KPI’s inside Office 2010 and leverage them for enterprise wide collaboration in SharePoint 2010
* Connect to Oracle database, making its data instantly available for interactive, multi-dimensional analysis
* Get the latest product upgrades to your existing NovaView suite

Webinar: NovaView 6.2 is here!
When: Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Register now >>