Panorama Software

Panorama Software is a Canadian software and consulting company specializing in business intelligence. The company was founded by Rony Ross in Israel in 1993; it relocated its worldwide headquarters to Toronto, Canada in 2003.^[1]

Panorama sold its OLAP technology to Microsoft in 1996, which was built into Microsoft OLAP Services and later SQL Server Analysis Services, an integrated component of the Microsoft SQL Server platform.

Panorama supports over 1,600 customers worldwide in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, telecommunications and life sciences. Panorama has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America, EMEA and Asia.

Products

Necto

The company’s main product is a business intelligence suite named Panorama Necto™. Deemed a "Business Intelligence 3.0" platform with enhanced user interfaces, increased user adoption, and better self-service for reduced operational costs, Necto presents data in a socially enabled setting. Necto offers the users self-serve data mining and report generation, allowing them to generate their own custom views of the data without having to wait on someone else to run a report for them. It lets users create collaborative "workboards" and visual presentations to provide better context as they put together ad-hoc business teams to address internal issues.^[2] The users are able to follow other leaders in the organization and discover those who are attempting to analyze similar data sets. The company contends this focus on social analysis leads, starting with business data and connecting it with the people who are involved in this data.

Necto is a BI application based upon understanding of user behavior, one-click reporting, and collaborative decision making. Panorama positions the product upon three strengths of social business intelligence, insights, and intuitive self-service. The platform supports the social sharing of data, similar to sharing found on consumer oriented social networking sites. Data analysis is treated as "conversations" which can themselves be followed and analyzed. Panorama encourages Necto enterprise users to form cross-departmental teams based on data research behaviors. The solution introduces intelligence to the BI engine through tracking of user behavior and making corresponding adjustments.^[3]

Necto is an end-to-end BI suite that includes analytics, custom reporting, intuitive dashboards, and integration with Microsoft Office/SharePoint. The solution is compatible running on top of multiple data sources including spreadsheets, in-memory, OLAP, or relational databases. Integration on Microsoft Azure and optimization with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 platform is also available. Necto™ also integrates with SharePoint and adds a social connection to this integration, combining structured data from Necto’s analysis services with unstructured data from SharePoint. ^[4] It can be scaled up to manage thousands of users and several terabytes of data.

Panorama and Microsoft

Panorama Software is the original developer of the online analytical-processing OLAP technology that Microsoft acquired in 1996 and rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services, an integrated component of the Microsoft SQL Server platform. Since this acquisition, Panorama has actively offered solutions to support the Microsoft platform as a Microsoft Gold ISV Competency partner. Whether on-premises or as a software-as-a-service, Panorama integrates with Microsoft to meet the demands from the largest of enterprise users.^[5]

References

External links

• Panorama Software web site
• Free Necto Trial
• Extending the Reach of Business Intelligence - DM Review, July 2003 profile of Rony Ross and history of Panorama Software