Panorama Business Intelligence Blog

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.

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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

The world of Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly attractive for many businesses as companies look for viable options other than continuously investing money into buying software that needs to be installed and maintained in-house .  Not only is SaaS becoming a viable option, it is also becoming a feasible alternative, in many cases, to traditional application software vendors.  There are numerous reasons that can help explain this phenomenon.  On the IT side of the equation, most CIOs are always on the lookout for ideal application delivery options and the ability to dramatically reduce large amounts of their budgets spent on IT-related administration and support is a very attractive proposition.  Furthermore, the cost of staffing and increasing IT-complexity makes a SaaS-based approach very appealing. On the business side of the equation, there are many cases where buying a service helps reduce the burden from IT when there is a need for a new solution to support the business.  

A great example of a SaaS-based solution is Google Apps.  Google’s solution compels companies to ask themselves why they would install a productivity suite when they could just use it as a set of services.  The uptake on Google Apps has been tremendous and the potential for both improvement and growth can be seen (500,000 companies currently using it worldwide with 3,000 added every day).  Another example of a remarkable SaaS-based solution is Salesforce.com. With one million users, their value proposition is based on the fact that an organization need not purchase and install a cumbersome CRM system that will cost a fortune to maintain.  Rather, use it as a service and keep your headaches to a minimum!

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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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