Panorama Review
On the surface of things Panorama would look like many contemporary business intelligence platforms – charts, dashboards and so on. However in many ways Panorama is ahead of the game and offers a platform with in-built intelligence to help users discover and explore, and ultimately establish causality. Since data exploration and discovery is often carried out with the aim of establishing some form of cause and effect relationship, clearly this is a useful feature. In fact all a user has to do is home in on a particular data element and click the ‘Cause and Effect’ button, for related information to be displayed.
The BI platform delivered by Panorama is called Necto, and it rests on four pillars:
- Visualization through infographics, and not just the usual bar charts and scatter plots. These truly are infographics aimed at conveying a message.
- The Suggestive Engine supports smart data discovery, and understands the nature of the data and the relationships between the various sources.
- Collaboration is a major feature in Necto, with support for annotations on charts, through to knowing who else might have an understanding of the data being worked on.
- Governance is well catered for, with fine control over who sees what.
The whole environment is supported with guided suggestions, and users create, communicate and work on WorkBoards – effectively smart dashboards. Necto learns as the platform gets used, allowing it to make more accurate suggestions.
Most data sources are supported including databases, online apps, files and more contemporary columnar databases such as HP Vertica.
This is not just another dashboard and charting platform, and Panorama allows users to handle high levels of data complexity through the support provided by its suggestive engine. The net result is that users get the answers they need in much less time, improving both productivity and accuracy.