Business Innovation in the Marketing of IT solutions– "Make IT Different"

From BPI Nituv

Business agility, pioneering and fast response are the very basic pillars of any successful high-tech or Information-Technology firms.

Innovative business marketing should begin with identifying and recognizing the relevant market-trends. However until innovation is integrated in the firm's strategy and day-by-day business behavior, we mustn’t expect the business to leverage itself.

The following post, offers an overview and example of how business innovation has helped the IT Israeli company “Panorama Software” to survive in a competitive market and extend the firm's target market.

Founded in 1993, Panorama is a leading innovator in DSS & BI software and tools, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Multidimensional Expressions (MDX).

Business intelligence (BI) solutions provide top managers, analysis and users with skills, knowledge and practical applications to acquire a better understanding of market behavior and commercial context. For this purpose it undertakes the collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data already gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working with operational data. Typical BI & DSS applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management.

In 1996, Panorama sold its OLAP technology to Microsoft Corporation, which was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated it in the SQL Server platform. Since then Panorama has continued to develop and sell its product and compete against a variety of DSS, BI, Analysis and Reporting tools with relative success.

But, the major change began around 2006 when Panorama initiated innovative business partnerships with companies such as Google and SalesForce.com. By finding the right complementary way to integrate with huge and successful vendors, Panorama has extended its revenue and market presence all over the world.

Nevertheless, the change mentioned above was a natural outcome of several strategic decisions made by Panorama since 2003, which combined business and technology innovation:

By identifying globalization as a marketing opportunity to penetrate the global market, Panorama extended its business beyond the local Israeli boundaries. Today, Panorama solutions has deployed as their DSS and BI tools at more than 1200 global organizations, some large scale enterprises.
Panorama has identified DSS & BI as a growing market and has allocated the relevant resources needed to establish technology partnerships with global world-wide software and IT service vendors.
After many years of selling its software in the old conservative model of license per-user, Panorama recognized the need for customers to change this model and buy their software in different way. Panorama innovatively, devised a special bundle with one of the leading CRM vendors and changed its licensing model to apply to an SAAS (Software as a service) usage and licensing model.

Win-Win Innovative Partnership

During 2006, Panorama Software partnered with Google to provide new capabilities for Google applications and Google docs via the strongest suite of analytics, reporting and visualization applications. Panorama’s solution provides ready to use functionality with solutions such as “Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Spreadsheets” which extends Google spreadsheets in a user-friendly, easy to use and flexible MS-Excel like, Pivot Table. The partnership was quite a risky step, since from Panorama’s point of view, many resources had to be invested while the revenue (if any) from the partnership was very hard to measure. Nonetheless it was worthwhile not only for Panorama but also for Google, which gained additional functionality, and at the end of the day, has affected the conservative Microsoft users to consider Google applications as an alternative.

The second interesting partnership, which emphasized Panorama’s innovative business thinking, is the Nova-View for Sales-Force solution. Sales-Force is a Web-based CRM solution for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations. Its Software as-a-Service concept enables developers to create and deliver any type of business application, entirely on-demand and without owning and installing the software. The brand new Panorama Nova-View for Sales Force provides important DSS & Reporting functionality which is needed for analysis and decision making. It is needless to say that Panorama's creative thinking was needed, considering Panorama had always sold via the Per-License model and now they had changed to the SaaS model.

The secret behind these two successful partnerships is not only creative innovative thinking but the fact each party made extensive efforts to create a Win-Win partnership, even when radical decisions had to be taken.

By using interesting Innovative business thinking, agility and pioneering, Panorama Software won a significant new market share and according to Panorama's reports, they closed more than 60 global deals during the 3rd quarter of 2008.

Panorama understood that Innovation is not about adding new features and technologies; instead it is all about finding the way to challenge the basic fear of changes (if it works don’t touch…) and in this manner created a brand new market for its products.

We mustn't confuse "Innovation" with "Invention", when it comes to the crowded IT market.