Panorama to bridge business intelligence from Microsoft to SAP

Microsoft Office 2007 is being developed to work as a business intelligence front end application for SAP BW by BI systems developer Panorama Software. Currently, Office 2007’s BI capabilities are available only to SQL Server users, but Panorama says that with its NovaView, SAP users will be able to get on board and use the functionality in Office 2007 beyond its out of the box capabilities. “Through this initiative, Panorama leads the middle-tier market for BI by building the intelligence hub to deliver SAP data through familiar front end programs,” claims Eynav Azarya, Panorama CEO. And beyond that, the system will offer a integration with Microsoft Outlook, enabling what the company describes as a new personal BI dashboard – where users can drag and drop any type of data into a visible side pane. “We will enable information workers to have easy access to core metrics from within Outlook in order for them to measure and identify tasks and processes,” says said Oudi Antebi, vice president marketing at Panorama.