Combo of ProfitBase, Panorama delivers SA's fastest BI

The recent entry of Panorama to the South African market closes the loop in terms of rapid delivery of business intelligence (BI). This is the word from Reinald Bormann, product and contractor manager at Harvey Jones, South Africa's leading Microsoft-centric BI specialist and a company in the AIM-listed Avisen group.

"Since we launched Panorama and its flagship product, NovaView, in South Africa, we have come to understand its role and full potential," says Bormann.

"It brings the fastest delivery of BI front-ends to customers. As such, it perfectly complements ProfitBase, which delivers the market's fastest fully functional data warehouse. We believe it is now possible to deliver a functional BI solution in five to 10 days, depending on complexity.”

In February last year, Harvey Jones delivered a full data warehouse to paper distributor Peters Papers in just four days. This is believed to be a South African record; Harvey Jones was subsequently named Distributor of the Year for Norway's ProfitBase, and has secured 10 local clients.

The front-end development at Peters Papers took six days, delivering various reports using Microsoft Reporting Services and ProClarity. “If we had to redevelop these reports in Panorama today, it would take us less than two days, and we would deliver much more functionality to end-users.” continues Bormann.

"With Panorama we can now deliver on the promise of quick BI, from the back-end to the front-end," says Bormann. "Panorama's Smart Reporting module is really easy to use and allows users to create reports in minutes, including full customisation, graphs and comments. Beforehand, an experienced developer with Microsoft Reporting Services skills would have taken around four hours to produce such a report. In this sense, Panorama's Smart Reporting empowers end-users and frees them from their dependency on IT."

Many companies have embraced the dashboard concept, and Bormann says Panorama will halve the time taken to create new dashboards.

"Panorama Dashboards has a template-driven design approach, with many KPI gauges preconfigured," says Bormann, "bringing ease of use and rapid delivery of dashboards for administrators and end-users."

To test the overall performance of the two products, Harvey Jones conducted a proof of concept with a client, and in just two days it delivered a data warehouse with ProfitBase, and front-end and dashboard with Panorama.

Panorama was founded in 1993; it sold its OLAP technology to Microsoft in 1996, where it was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated into the SQL Server platform. Its most recent accolade was to be chosen as the BI offering within Google Apps. Panorama can be delivered as either an on-premise or software-as-a-service solution.