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BI Marches Onwards, Onwards

People and Computers Weekly, Information Week, Issue 1249, March 26, 2007
Following the Panorama conference, March 7, 2007, Hilton Hotel, Tel Aviv

Avi Belizovsky

An estimated 700 senior users of Panorama Software’s Proactive Business Intelligence solution attended the Panorama customers’ conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel.  At the conference, produced by the People and Computers group, Panorama presented Release 5 of its BI software, Panorama NovaView®, developed for SQL and SAP BW databases.

The Company also presented its Proactive BI approach – process-guided business intelligence personally adapted to the needs of information workers in the organization. In this framework, the Panorama system enables the construction of a personally customized indicator panel integrated into familiar applications including Outlook and Excel. In addition, the company presented new capabilities to enhance workflow and business process procedures driven by the Panorama alerts mechanism.

“The BI field in Israel is considerably more efficient than in other countries, and part of this success can be attributed to Panorama – which fired up the Israeli imagination,” said Rony Ross, founder and chair of Panorama Software. “Panorama’s successes in international markets created fertile ground for the advanced adoption of BI in Israel, and is advanced by comparison with markets around the world. Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion is another example of this. We are discussing a fascinating subject at the heart of the software world today.

“Panorama’s technology has developed and progressed. There are few major customers who do not use Panorama, and use increases daily. Following the success of the product, which the technology was purchased by Microsoft, we have created much business for Microsoft. As a Microsoft partner we continue to grow and progress. We have opened a headquarter office in Canada, as well as offices in the United States and Europe. Gil Nizri is Panorama’s CEO for Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and eastern and western Europe. Panorama‘s global growth is incredible.  For example, in the past year, we have secured customer agreements with UBS, Bank of America, Nokia and Harley Davidson.”

Working in two environments

One of the most significant announcements at the conference was Panorama’s entry into the SAP world.  They presented a new product, which is the only one of its kind to enable the integration of data from both the Microsoft and SAP BW environments at the same time; on a single desktop.

Gil Nizri, CEO of Panorama Israel, said, “Although this year we have gone into the SAP BW environment, we intend to retain the status of our product in the Microsoft environment as well.  In addition, we are moving forward toward the Proactive BI era, with the ability to automate business processes. Our objective through this is to reduce TCO by offering our customers quick installation time, which helps to achieve this. In addition, we have a new business opportunity this year – Microsoft’s ERP, for which Panorama has a system enabling utilization of the information it stores.”

At the conference, the Company presented their roadmap to change the BI landscape, which included featuring an approach called Proactive Business Intelligence, or PBI. Gil Nizri and Uri Rubin, project manager at Panorama, presented the main points of the next generation of Business Intelligence products – operational BI systems providing a business environment guided by business processes and scenarios, adapted personally to each consumer of organizational information.  This means, each information worker can create a personal work environment (Personalized Dashboard) and attach it as an integral part of one or more Office applications.

Panorama also revealed capabilities for structuring business processes through a Workflow infrastructure.  At the conference, Panorama spoke to their ability to enable the business processes to be linked to a trigger operated as the result of a business event. This capability can be harnessed to the performance of guided analysis, as well as implementing business scenarios caused as the result of the automatic calculation of business parameters.

The moderator of the event, Ziv Mandel, joint CEO of John Bryce Training (Panorama's only training house in Israel), said, "Until now, Panorama has been identified with Microsoft, and now it is entering a new area – the SAP era.  This is of great significance in the Israeli market, due to the widespread deployment of SAP."

Dedi Devorsky, manager of Ness-Pro, the products group of Ness Technologies, pointed out that Ness is a strategic partner of Panorama and that the two companies joined forces to develop the Panorama interface to SAP's organizational data warehouse.  "The Ness-Pro group is the products group of Ness and represents some 30 companies.  This year we are about to celebrate our 30th anniversary and share this celebration with one of the first customers we represented - Simsor. We’re also proud to say we have customers we have worked with for more than 20 years, such as Sybas.  A year ago we decided to change direction with regard to BI, and moved over from ProClarity to Panorama.  We saw and liked Panorama's capabilities and its position in the Israeli market. 

“Panorama's decision to partner with Ness to move into the SAP space is smart, and shows the wisdom of Rony and Gil, who know the formula for success.  The ability of Ness-Pro and SAP to work together, understand the customers' requirements, and identify what is missing, was also attractive to Panorama.  We built the Panorama solution together with the BW team at SAP.  It has been added to our basket of supplementary products, about 10 products that each SAP customer is familiar with.  Each SAP customer has at least one supplementary product from the Ness-Pro group," added Devorsky.

Global application

Also attending the conference was Daniela Banitz of NPS, a Slovenian company that implements Panorama solutions in projects throughout the world.  "The company has been in operation for 11 years, mainly in the field of ERP, and we have recently opened a CRM department. At the same time we began to specialize in the field of BI, and chose to collaborate with Panorama.  We began working on a global project with Panorama, and by year-end I am confident we will be well established throughout the world."  She concluded by saying, "It takes a long time to assimilate an ERP project. Acquiring expertise in the ERP reports is also significant and time consuming, so for us, Panorama’s time-saving solution was the best solution for everyone."

Twelve Panorama business partners also participated in the conference with five of them presenting customer cases. IBM presented a solution that works over SAP BW in Supersol; Consyst presented a project for improving profitability in David Lubinsky; Gilon presented for Panorama “In the Age of Satellite” - a project carried out for YES; High View presented the large Scorecard deployment for the Israel Police force; and Glasshouse-Integrity presented implementation of the customer-oriented strategy in Tami-4.

Gal Govsy, VP of the BI division at Consyst, and Dor Kleiman, VP Finance at David Lubinsky, presented The David Lubinsky solution. “David Lubinsky, like many importers, has many dimensions of business activity, including the sale of new and pre-owned cars, garages, spare parts, service and so forth..  The company's motto is to involve the customer in every activity – operational leasing, bikes, ATVs and car insurance (Lovit).

"We suffered from a number of problems with our excellent operational system trying to produce reports for key decision makers.  The reports were convoluted, and it was difficult for users to investigate and control things the way they wanted to on an everyday basis.  When it is not possible to investigate, it is not possible to plan – and so, for some of the activities there was no budget. Panorama solved the problems, and today the information is available to every user with the appropriate authorization, at the every level.  The information is accessible to both the simple and sophisticated user.  Most having to deal with this information has moved over from ‘cooking’ to ‘digesting,’” they said.

Ofer Avnery, joint CEO of High View, presented the BI system that the company developed together with Panorama for the Israel Police, the largest Scorecard project in the world, which is intended to enable the Inspector General of the force to get a clear and comprehensive indication of the way the police force is operating.  The system examines the indices at each police station and enables the station commander, as well as others in the police force, to identify problems at specific stations and deal with them, therefore improving services to the citizens.

Shimon Felikovitch, leader of the BI project at Supersol and a consultant in the BI group at IBM, spoke about the relatively new project of setting up a Panorama BI system in a SAP BW environment. The system enables each supplier to know the stock levels of his products at each branch of the Supersol chain. According to Felikovitch, despite the fact this is a complex system, installation took less than two days, compared with the three months it took to construct the previous system.

Sharon Ziv, of Glasshouse (formerly Integrity) and Raz Mishkovitz, CIO of Tami 4, presented the Panorama project at Tami 4, which reveals irregularities, mainly in the field of service, because of the customer-focused strategy.  "The Panorama system retrieves data from the different information systems in the organization – the Siebel CRM system, the Oracle ERP system and the IVR system – and enables us to improve implementation of our customer-oriented strategy," said Mishkovitz.

An overall picture for management

Gal Rimon, CEO of Gilon Israel, Ori Hai, CRM manager at YES, and Dana Alei-Raz, BI manager at YES, presented the YES Smart system which enables CEOs to obtain an updated picture of their company's operational and service indices, and to investigate this data independently.

"We wanted to see independent research of data.  Our managers are highly involved in the day-to-day activities, but can't wait for information systems and we don't want to burden them with collecting data. We want to do it ourselves, and also get to the level of analysis. It was important to go into the project from a business view with a business partner. Gilon also brought clear business thinking; we worked closely with all the users across the organization.  The system is great because it opens our eyes.  Before, we were busy all day collecting data.  Now, the data is revealed to everyone proactively and we can talk about successes at the business level," says Hai.

A forum of CIOs, including Ori Hai of YES, Iris Nachshoni of Mei Eden, Reuven Kovent, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, and Avi Kasco, CIO of Tel Aviv Municipality was held later at the conference, where they had the opportunity to comment on Panorama and its solutions.

Nachshoni: "What symbolizes our time is constant change in companies, and we in IT have to adapt ourselves to the change.  The Panorama tool made the changes easy and possible for us.  Managing a system of 18 countries in addition to Israel would not have been possible without the BI tool."

Kasco: “In government bodies or local authorities, each process of allocating budgets relates not only to financial performance, but also to other operational and business considerations.  These types of organizations require great emphasis to be placed on control.  There is the strength of regulation and the need for transparency.  The Panorama system enables better services to be given to the individual, to the group, and to the entire assembly – passing on economic advantages to the residents themselves."

Ori Hai: "Many people here have come from the IT world, but we have no justification without the customer.  At YES, the main challenge is to increase income.  In this respect, BI systems can identify opportunities in the market and exploit them with a minimum response time."

Kovent: "We chose the Panorama system as one of the basic systems with the goal to serve our customers. The company has been operating in Israel for 50 years in the area of information management….More and more customers want to receive integrated data.  Dozens of Dun & Bradstreet managers around the world to whom we have shown the system can attest to its success."

Einat Shimoni, VP and senior analyst at STKI, summed up the event with an analysis of trends and new directions in the field of BI in Israel and around the world.  "BI was one of the fields that CIOs talked about investing in during 2007. Surveys around the world indicate an improvement in the process. Today, CIOs are trying to cope with how to improve the existing processes, how to make them better and more innovative, and how to create differentiation.

"The field of BI is emerging as one that helps improve processes.  The way in which we use the BI tool is undergoing a change: from a tool that is found at the top – strategic and directional - to something more everyday; a tactical and operative work tool.  The BI market has grown by 15 percent -- a nice increase in a market that is very mature.  We see greater growth, 25 percent to 30 percent, in the coming year.  Organizations that did not use it are beginning to, and organizations that do are expanding.

"In the past, BI was directed toward senior management.  We wanted to give them tools for more informed decision making.  Today, we are talking about the entire organization – how can we give BI services to the whole organization? This requires us to think differently, plan differently, co-operate with different departments in the organization, and include the subject of alerts, to cover the entire pyramid.

"Every information worker will be exposed in one form or another to BI services. When we get into the field of SLA, it will be easier because it will be possible to make better use of BI data. The question is whether BI will remain alone, or whether it will be distributed among the operational systems.

 

Panorama NovaView® and the Panorama logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panorama Software Ltd. All other company, product or brand names are the trademarks or the registered trademarks of their respective companies. Panorama Software Ltd. is not responsible for errors or omissions. Copyright 2006 Panorama Software Ltd. All rights reserved.