Self Service BI – Open day at Microsoft (PowerPivot and Panorama)

On Sunday, July 25, 2010, Panorama (http://www.panorama.com/) and Microsoft Israel had an Open Day event about Self Service BI.

Ariel and Amir Netz from the Product Group in Redmond also participated at the event.

My thought about the event:

PowerPivot:

It is a great tool for Excel Users. It is a massive advantage of Excel. And it is free. Lots of information, including online demo, can be found at http://www.powerpivot.com/. BTW, PowerPivot is a Column Oriented DB. This is the magic of great performances and amazing compression (for ex. 100 million records at 300 MB).
The market of Colum Oriented Databases is growing fast.
PowerPivot has "Office look and feel ". None of the OLAP terminology is used. No MDX, no dimensions and facts. Users can add calculated columns written in VBA, not MDX. All Excel functions can be used.
PowerPivot has 40 new functions, for ex. DATESYTD, DATESINPERIOD, and more. All part of the DAX - Data Analysis Expressions. Unique feature of PowerPivot.
The lack of hierarchies is a problem. Business Analysts used to see the data in a hierarchy: Category, Subcategory, product.
Refreshing the data - uploading 50 M records takes time and impact the source database. Let's say the daily change is just 10K records. There is no way to only upload the new data. Also, there are no partitions. Users can use built in wizard to schedule refreshes (PowerPivot for Moss only). You must monitor the impact on the source systems.
PowerPivot for MOSS Monitoring - there is a GREAT built in tool to analyze the activity and usage of files. Also, who did what (auditing).
One the coming new features (when?) is using amazing data visualization. http://www.getpivot.com/ Users can see images which backgrounds (red, yellow, and green). This way they can easily see the pictures of problematic customers (company logo) or products (image of the product). At the bottom of the image you can also place a chart (sales value, goal, trends ...)

But, only organizations who switched to Excel 2010 can benefit from PowerPivot. Today, most organizations haven't migrated or won't finish the migration in the near future.

PowerPivot for MOSS can only be implemented on MOSS 2010 (not cheap, requires SQL 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 R2 => complex implementation).

PowerPivot and Panorama

Better visualization using Panorama NovaView suite. The most user friendly analytical client available today.
Now users can drill down a hierarchy.
Includes Dashboard.
Better security, integrated with SSAS cubes per dimension / member. Each user will only see his portion of the data.
Smart Reporting - a new tool for reports. Users can Create, format and distribute high quality reports in one click. Can be converted to Excel and PDF.
Great integration with Sharepoint.
Panorama gives more power to the Business Analysts: Highlighting exceptions, Instant calculations (no need for MDX).
Drag & drop analysis and reports
Search engine for instant Data Search. Faster navigation of flat Dimensions. For ex. "Mountain Bike", Q3, Arizona. Very nice.
Easy integration with Exchange. Users can send BI data by email easily.
But, customers still need two technologies: PowerPivot and Panorama to implement self-service BI for Relational data. And, as I said earlier, the fact everything depends on the implementation of MOSS 2010 is a problem because it is not used widely.

Bottom Line:

Everybody wants Self-Service BI. But, when users need to understand the data they generate, the performance impact on the source systems might be huge, and they might break the first rule of Single Version of the Truth! (Users have different answers for the same questions).
PowerPivot is Microsoft's answer for Self Service BI for Relational Data. PowerPivot is just an engine. A viewer, such as Excel 2010 or Panorama, can query the files created by the engine.
Everything much easier when you already have a cube. Single version of the truth, easy to query and understand, self-service BI using Panorama (or other third party tools).
This technology is not commonly used because it depends on MOSS 2010 and / or Excel 2010. Let's speak again in 6 months from now.