Panorama Software unveils PowerApps

TORONTO, CANADA: Solution provider for Proactive Business Intelligence, Panorama Software has announced its PowerApps strategy, a cloud computing analytical engine for Business Intelligence (BI) applications.

Through PowerApps, ISVs and software developers can now take advantage of the first “Analytics as a Service” platform to develop and extend various analytical applications using the power of cloud computing.

PowerApps is a Web-based, hosted and extremely efficient OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) platform that can create, manage and support any type of analysis scenario. The platform offers APIs to create OLAP cubes as well as to deliver and create customized, user-facing reports from within Google Apps.

“The world is rapidly moving to use more and more 'cloud computing' services as opposed to on-premise installations of every single service internally. Panorama PowerApps is currently the only analytics service that can be used instead of traditional on-premise BI platforms. Its versatility, combined with the affordability of its Software as a Service delivery model, makes it an ideal choice for many classes of BI applications,” said Oudi Antebi, vice president of marketing and strategy for Panorama Software.

“Panorama is the company that developed the most innovative OLAP technology and sold it to Microsoft ten years ago. This technology became the foundation of SQL Server Analysis Services, the most popular OLAP engine today,” said Eynav Azarya, CEO of Panorama Software. “Now we are building the next generation of OLAP solutions for the new era of cloud computing. “

“Panorama’s cloud computing strategy and its integration with Google Apps provides our customers powerful analytical and visualization capabilities for Google Apps. We are looking forward to seeing ISVs take advantage of the PowerApps APIs to extend the core capabilities provided by Panorama and make Google Apps even stronger in the enterprise,” stated Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise.

Panorama’s PowerApps uses industry standards to create and access data. As such, Multidimensional Expression (MDX) will be the way to query the data once hosted, and new tools will enable easy data upload and cube creation and management. As a default front end, Panorama will offer ways to customize its solution for Google Apps; however, any MDX-supporting front end application will be able to query data sitting on PowerApps—even Microsoft Excel.

Panorama PowerApps is currently available for testing by registration on www.power-apps.com and will be broadly available by the end of 2008, along with sample applications and code that showcases usage of the platform.