Panorama one of BI companies that grew on top of Microsofts SQL Server (BI) stack has recently announced plans to port its NovaView platform to SAP's Business Information Warehouse (BW). Once that project ships-perhaps by late this year or early next year-Panorama will boast the same deep integration with SAP BW that it's touted for years on SQL Server, Oudi Antebi claims.

Panorama is the latest in a long list of suitors, couple of months back Cognos The Ottawa-based BI giant this week unveiled an update to its Cognos 8 BI suite which improves that product's interoperability with SAP's NetWeaver platform. Cognos joined an already long list that includes MicroStrategy Inc. Applix Inc., Hyperion Solutions Corp., Informatica Corp., and Microsoft Corp., all have outlined substantive SAP outreach efforts in the last 12 months.

Oudi Antebi believes that Panaroma is going to be better than these competitors,

"Why do so many [vendors] fail on BW? There is one answer: no one has really gone deep. No one has made an effort to go deep enough [into BW] to integrate with BW fully [on its own terms]," he argues. "BW exposes very ugly naming conventions. If you don't develop a layer to translate those naming conventions, you're not going to do it right. The way the other vendors work is they have one platform and what they say is we are going to connect to any data source you have, bring it all together, and give it the best enterprise BI you need. But the downside is you have to choose the lowest common denominator between all the platforms."

Panorama, by contrast, is "going deep," Antebi says. "We're not taking NovaView 5 and adding capabilities so that the same platform can connect to BW. We're actually writing a special layer to connect to BW and only BW, so we're solving problems that are unique to BW. [Things such as] exception management-we're writing our own exception management engine for BW, for example. It cannot work against [SQL Server] Analysis Services. It works only against BW. By going deep into BW, we will achieve a lot more than anyone else has."

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Prashanth Rai