Panorama Business Intelligence Blog

Over the last few months, we have been undertaking many exciting initiatives that have caught the attention of many in the world of BI.  One of the most exciting projects that we’ve worked on has been the solutions that we’ve developed for Google Apps and Google Docs. 

It all began with our announcement in March of this year about the pivot table functionality that we had added to Google spreadsheets.  Since then, there has been so much that has happened!

It is with this in mind that we thought it would be great to have a webinar with our friends over at Google to showcase to the world the innovations that we’ve jointly developed!  The upcoming webinar, on September 23rd, 2008 at 1:00pm EST and registrations are already filling up! 

With Google Apps™, you can give your employees the next-generation communication and collaboration tools they need to manage, share and publish information. 

Panorama Software is building solutions to extend Google Apps™ with Analytics and Business Intelligence, offering a new way to analyze information and gain business insights.

If you’re interested in attending this webinar, featuring Panorama Software and the Google Apps team, then register today!  During this webinar you’ll learn about:

• What is “Business Intelligence 2.0”?
• Google Apps™ – An Extensible Productivity Suite
• Expanding Google Apps™ with BI Functionalities
• Live demonstrations

Click here to register!  We look forward to seeing you there!

It’s always great to have news to blog about and that certainly includes news that we’ve gotten a thumbs up from the analyst community.  Panorama earned first-time placement in recently-published “Forrester Wave”, published by Forrester Research.

We were among a select group of companies that Forrester invited to participate in the Forrester Wave report.  By the end of the evaluation, we scored well on Global Presence, Product Direction, and Pricing and Licensing. 

Business Intelligence, as a comprehensive and effective business improvement tool, is finding widespread acceptance in the marketplace.  We are certainly pleased that Panorama continues to be the platform of choice for companies the world over who demand exceptional business analytics.

The study acknowledged the huge credit deserved by Panorama Software due to the use of our code in the BI solutions of Microsoft and Google and highlighted that when all you need to do is OLAP, it’s hard to beat the MDX optimization, experience, and best practices that Panorama Software has accumulated over the years.

It always feels good to have a hearty pat on the back from the analyst community and we are happy to have been included in this very influential report. 

To learn more about the Forrester Wave, please visit www.forrester.com/wave.

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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The word of business intelligence could provide the perfect playground for Microsoft and Google to work together, providing a joint solution.

Even though many of us would be reluctant to admit it, we all love watching a great battle.  There is something about witnessing to two opposing sides combating to the bitter end.  Whether it’s the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, Obama vs. Clinton or even those two maniacs pulled over on the side of the road engaging in fisticuffs, consumed with road rage, we crane our necks to get a good eye-full of the action!  It is with the same excitement that the Microsoft vs. Google story has remained high on the interest level of both consumers and corporations. 

Many in the analyst and media communities thrive on focusing on the attention-grabbing element of this “presumable” battle between the Redmond and Mountain View-based companies, especially in the realm of their respective productivity suite offerings.  Microsoft Office and Google Apps, when stacked up side-by-side are actually two very different beasts.  Google has taken the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) approach to their offering and Microsoft has stayed true to its on-premise software.

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New PowerApps Platform Gives Enterprises, ISVs and Developers a Cost-Effective Way to Power Business Intelligence Applications Via the Web

TORONTO, ON – (June 4th, 2008) – Panorama Software, a global leader in Proactive Business Intelligence solutions, today officially announced its PowerApps™ strategy, a cloud computing analytical engine for Business Intelligence (BI) applications. Through PowerApps, ISVs and software developers can now take advantage of the first “Analytics as a Service” platform to develop and extend various analytical applications using the power of cloud computing.

PowerApps is a Web-based, hosted and extremely efficient OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) platform that cancreate, manage and support any type of analysis scenario. The platform offers APIs to create OLAP cubes as well as to deliver and create customized, user-facing reports from within Google Apps™.

PowerApps is the analytical engine powering Panorama’s analytical solution for Google Docs™.For more information please visit: www.panorama.com/google/.

“Cloud computing challenges the rules and commercial model of the software platform vendors, and is a significant major trend in the software world,” said Gerry Brown, Associate Analyst with Bloor Research International. “Panorama’s PowerApps delivers analytics as a service, and joins solutions such as Amazon® S3 and the Google BigTable in offering a differentiated cost-effective alternative solution to those of the traditional platform providers.”

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I want to show you a work I finished few months ago. I’m very proud of this work as it will be in the desktop of our CEO and I got many compliments for it. Making this was possible thanks to the Panorama SDK.

There’s a problem getting out screenshots out of my company, so I did a sketch in Power Point. Note that what you see in the picture is not the real screenshot of the work (It’s much more beautiful in the reality…).

This is the functionality of the leds map (my design, if you have any comments):

• The leds map is simply a web site, meaning zero-footprint in the client’s computer. Some computers in my company has java compatibility problems, so I added a parameter you can send with the site’s URL which changes the applet’s java version (see more in the next post, which will be more technical).
• The leds map has to be small, about a quarter of the screen. That’s because it’s intended to be a part of the CEO’s desktop.
• When the map loads, a picture with a turning-around The Thinker statue is shown with a “Loading” message below (our CEO loves that statue…).
• After the map has been loaded, the user sees two axis with the leds in them. The two axis can represent any Meta-Measures you’d like: Short-Term Profit Vs. Long-Term Profit, Client’s Satisfaction Vs. Company’s Profit, etc. This is a point that many people have difficulty to understand, so I’ll give an example: The yellow led is in the top-right corner, so that says that the underlying measure is very important in both the meta-measures. Going on with the example, that says that this measure is very important for theClient’s Satisfaction and for the Company’s Profit. Note that the leds never move. Only their color changes.

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First it was the blog world that was buzzing about Panorama’s initiative with Google and now analysts are turning their attention to the unique offering by Panorama and Google.

Aberdeen Group, a leading provider of fact-based research focused on the global technology-driven value chain, issued a “Market Alert” yesterday offering an interesting opinion about the Panorama/Google solution.

Read it hear - http://www.aberdeen.com/launch/report/market_alert/5173-MA-panorama-google-business-intelligence.asp