To say the business intelligence software market is crowded would be an understatement.
Giants like IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, SAS, Microsoft are there, as well as significant players Tibco, Information Builders, MicroStrategy… All of them are trying to give users an edge on crunching data. Increasingly that edge is the ability to visualize numbers beyond bar and pie charts.
Toronto’s Panorama Software says it has a better way with the release today of its Necto 14 analytics and visualization suite.
The software now includes a library of images and symbols – cars, planes, silhouettes, boxes – for end users to create infographics that link to live data. As the data changes, so does the infographic.
“It’s about visualizing the insights, trends and processes in a way which is much more business-oriented,” said founder and chief technology officer Rony Ross in an interview.
“This creates astonishing results,” she said.
Together with Necto’s existing advanced analytics, Panorama has added features for making collaboration easier and the ability to make recommendations to users for displaying information based on how others use similar data “creates an amazing experience.”
Founded in Israel in 1993, one of Panorama’s first products was an online analytical processing software called ProClarity, later sold to Microsoft. Later, the company moved its headquarters to Canada.
For a number of years, its main BI product was NovaView. But about two years ago, it was overhauled and Necto was released. It’s available as a cloud service (SaaS) or as on-premise software. According to the company website, customers include three Canadian and two U.S. banks.
Necto is a Web-based solution that allows business users to analyze and visualize data from various databases. It links to staff who might be associated with data – for a sales report this might be sales staff, for example – to allow users to set up online meetings.
A root-cause engine helps users discover the source of problems, such as poor sales in a region.
The suite can delve into analysis models and add new data on the fly from other sources to expand an analysis.
Other features include Necto Notifier, which allows users to build notifications; Dimension Selector, which lets users organize data in one place; and an open database connectivity (ODBC) wizard, which helps users connect to any ODBC data source.