Industry-specific business intelligence software promised

It’s the clearest signal yet that analytics functionality is about to become much cheaper and much more accessible to ‘knowledge workers’ – meaning operational people throughout companies in production, maintenance, sales and back office functions, not just finance. Panorama says its objective is to, “provide information workers with innovative ways to drive core processes and make better business decisions based on actionable business insight.” “Panorama is moving beyond the traditional BI play and rewriting the rules on how companies run their businesses,” says Panorama Software CEO Eynav Azarya. “We focus on innovations that build on top of Microsoft’s BI platform and deliver solutions that make companies operate better and not just be better informed.” The new BI applications will be based on Microsoft’s BI platform – including the recently announced Microsoft Office PerformancePoint 2007 – and able to pull in all relevant information from whatever source, whether historical or current. Examples given by the company include its intended BI solution for high-tech manufacturing, which will apparently allow managers and others in production and the warehouses to have greater visibility into functions and process across their supply chains. Another is its system for sales analytics, which will harness manufacturers’ CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP applications to provide better visibility into customer trends and potential.