Google employs BI capabilities from Panorama, which sold its OLAP capabilities to Microsoft.
Google is looking to make its Spreadsheets application a little smarter.
The Mountain View, Calif., company March 18 said it is using BI (business intelligence) software from Toronto-based Panorama Software to let users leverage analytical and reporting tools.
In beta as a free gadget that loads within Google Spreadsheets, Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Spreadsheets uses the analysis, reporting, scorecard, dashboard and data modeling applications that constitute Panorama's NovaView suite.
However, to create Pivot Tables that satisfy Google's cloud computing model, the company has made its NovaView analytical engine available as a SAAS (software as a service) solution to facilitate the Pivot Table functionality for Spreadsheets.
Oudi Antebi, vice president of marketing and strategy for Panorama Software, told eWEEK that consumers will benefit from the Panorama tools that make Spreadsheets smarter, better helping them manage personal expenses or academic records.
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The application of Pivot Tables will likely have a larger impact among businesses that want Google Apps to be more enterprise-friendly. Specifically, ISVs will be able to write customer report templates, analytics and dashboards to boost their short-term decision making and long-term planning.
Traction could be particularly fast among SMBs (small and midsize businesses), which have proved particularly fond of downloading Google Apps because they are free. Antebi said NovaView has had basic integration with Google Spreadsheets since June 2006, but the March 18 news takes the relationship to a level closer to that of Panorama's pact with Microsoft.
Panorama sold its OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) platform to Microsoft in 1996. Microsoft then rebranded the platform as SQL Server Analysis Services and installed it in the company's popular SQL Server database platform.
More recently, Panorama partnered with Microsoft to enable NovaView in applications for 2007 Office, including Excel, PowerPoint and SharePoint Server. Microsoft has its own pivot tables in Excel.
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Google has a long way to go toward getting as comfortable with Panorama as Microsoft has, and even longer to match Microsoft's BI expertise, but the new Google-Panorama integration sows the seeds for a more fruitful relationship.
"Microsoft has made analytics and reporting a major value proposition within Office 2007," Antebi said. "What we are doing is putting similar functionality inside the Google environments."
To that end, Antebi said, Panorama is working on SAAS solutions that will work with Google Analytics and Google AdWords and is helping ISV partners leverage NovaView and APIs to build other custom SAAS products. Panorama hopes that a successful launch of its Pivot Tables within Google will lead to adoption by Salesforce.com, SAP and other SAAS providers.
Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson lauded the pact for providing free BI for customers. By extension, it's a smart move by Google to continue to push Google Docs into enterprises, he said. It's also another step to help Spreadsheets move closer to Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet application, which Microsoft licenses per seat.
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"In order to compete with Excel, among many other features, Google Spreadsheets lacked specific business functionality needed to analyze vast amounts of data stored in these spreadsheets," Evelson wrote. "With [the] Panorama free add-on [for] Google Spreadsheets, users can now take advantage of this lightweight—but still very respectable and powerful—OLAP engine."
BI users also now have another free BI option in addition to open-source BI tools from Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) and other open-source BI projects sponsored by Actuate, Jaspersoft and Pentaho.
