Panorama Business Intelligence

When 2008 drew to a close just twelve months ago, the extent of the damage caused by the economic crisis was continuing to unfold, and the outlook for 2009 was pretty dismaying and bleak. After discussing the future with some fellow CEOs, I found that many of them shared the same sentiment: “2009 is a ‘dead horse’ for us. We just have to weather this one through. We’ll have to wait until 2010 for the turnaround…”

Was 2009 a “lost year” from a business perspective?

It was, if you only measure the year by growth. Most companies exhibited slow, minimal growth—if any at all.

But, for many, 2009 was a great opportunity. It was a year of a return to profitability, with many companies reporting negative growth somewhat offset by growing EBITDA ratios. It was the year to get closer to your customers—because their support would enable you to drive business in these troublesome times. It was the year to focus on what your company does best. It was the year that helped pull us out of the weeds and build a greater understanding of our businesses. So, for those of you who recognized the value that such a downturn can bring, it was the year of challenges that—with a little ingenuity, confidence and effort—turned into opportunities.

Thank you, 2009!

To get the most out of your Microsot SQL Server Platform, you need to ensure that you take advantage of all the unique capabilities it provides. While some BI tools are available from Microsoft directly, many have shown interest in extending those tools with a complete end-to-end Business Intelligence solution.

Join us for a webinar, to see the most powerful, end-to-end BI solution that helps expand the reach of BI through innovative user interface, gives more power to the advanced users and extends collaboration inside and outside the firewall.

And now, through the global partnership between Panorama and Microsoft and tighter integration with PowerPivot, Sharepoint and Office 2010, Panorama NovaView provides an even better end user experience that can accommodate the needs of the most demanding enterprise companies.

Come see the BI solution that has been awarded silver in the Best Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool category by SQL Server magazine!

This webinar will showcase how you can:

- Make BI simpler for end users
- Extend the reach of existing reports to more information workers
- Give analysts powerful tools to find hidden insights that could make a big impact
- Create interactive reports on top of any data (OLAP, relational and spreadsheets)

When:

Wednesday, January 20, 2010
10:00 AM ET / 4:00 PM CET
or
11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET

Register for the Webinar Now >>

…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?
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Panorama Software has been awarded silver in the Best Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool category by SQL Server magazine.

SQL Server, the only independent magazine dedicated to covering Microsoft’s SQL Server, is a technical resource for developers, database administrators and business intelligence architects. The magazine awarded Panorama Software as the silver winner in the business intelligence category for our latest release of NovaView 6.

This award is just another proof that NovaView 6 is the most powerful, end-to-end Business Intelligence suite for the Microsoft platform on the market today. It provides an integrated approach to bringing more users to BI, giving more power to the advanced users and easing collaboration inside and outside the firewall. And now through the tighter integration with PowerPivot, Sharepoint and Office 2010, Panorama NovaView provides an even better end user experience that can accommodate the needs of the most demanding BI users in the organization.

SQL Server published an in depth feature for its annual Editors’ Choice Awards in the December issue. To read more please visit www.sqlmag.com.

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.

Today’s information worker uses reports to create a snapshot of aggregated data that gives them the initial effective information necessary to do their jobs correctly. What most users still don’t have is the ability to combine their own perspective with the data to freely navigate the data, pivot it, and generate unique insights.

Join us for a webinar where we will demonstrate how you can empower your users with self-service analytics and get BI on every desktop in a comprehensive and cost effective way.
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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.

We’d love to invite everyone to our next webinar that will take place on Tuesday, October 27th.

Combine the Power of OLAP with Ad-Hoc Self-Service Reporting
Sign up for the webinar >>

The power and value of OLAP are widely appreciated among BI users and IT departments. The ability to interact with data to generate instant insights has proven to be the most powerful BI engine available.

The biggest challenge with OLAP is the lack of ad-hoc flexibility to generate reports on top of the data that was not previously brought into an OLAP cube.

Join us for a webinar where we will demonstrate how users can benefit from the power of OLAP for ad-hoc reporting and analysis. With Panorama’s new universal data connector, end users can connect to any data source and start analyzing it instantly while OLAP models are automatically created for them behind the scenes.
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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.

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Over the past few years, open source business intelligence has played a significant role in the BI marketplace. But just why, exactly, is the cloud marketplace suddenly putting such a heavy strain on the use of open source BI software?

As is the case with a lot of market shifts, cost plays a crucial role here. The original adopters of open source BI were SMBs without the resources to spend on complex business intelligence solutions. But with the evolution of SaaS, the parameters of “inexpensive” BI solutions are shifting away from on-premise open source towards solutions that don’t require costly hardware.

Well, advocates for political correctness will be happy to hear that cloud is chasing open source out the window, especially in the BI space.

SaaS business intelligence solutions are starting a run to dominate the BI market. Without the need for hardware, extensive time-to-market, or extra resources for setup, the cost to set up a BI solution plummets – even from the relative cost-effectiveness of open source.
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I found an interesting review of Panorama Software’s latest product by one of the NovaView users. Enjoy it!

“I’m very glad to say that not too long ago I got to see a demo on Panorama Nova View 6 with the rest of the BI team, enabling me to further give you detail on it.

The demo covered quite a few of the major products:
- NovaView Analytics – which existed in previous version though it’s UI has changed
- NovaView Flash Analytics – which is one of the new features in this version
- NovaView Smart Reporting
- NovaView Dashboards
- NovaView Executive Dashboards
- NovaView Universal Data Connector – which is another major new feature in this release..”

Read full review here: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/barbaro/