Scaling PowerPivot into an Enterprise BI solution

Microsoft PowerPivot has empowered the user to create compelling self-service BI solutions: an instant “in-memory BI solution” that allows easy data mash-ups so you can query your data.

Ultimately the goal of BI is to empower all users and share your analytics, reporting and knowledge with the workgroup or enterprise. Building high quality, scalable analytics and dashboards or sharing the solution is a challenge and is the core weakness of almost all self-service BI platforms - including PowerPivot .

Self-Service BI to Enterprise BI in 5 clicks

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With Pyramid, users can now upload their PowerPivot spreadsheets to a SQL 2012 server, and effectively upgrade their personal BI solution into one that the entire organization can use. Pyramid provides an elegant and simple, 5-click / 5-minute process for uploading and sharing analytic and reporting content.

PowerPivot and Pyramid Analytics
Read this case study to see how a major health system used Pyramid to blend self-service BI with enterprise BI using PowerPivot and SQL Server Tabular Cubes.

PowerPivot & Tabular cubes in bioXL analytics and bioPoint dashboards

Pyramid's PowerPivot Uploader also provides several key benefits:

  • Authorized end users can drive cube creation and deployment on their own
  • Security for uploaded cubes can be set by the end users directly from the Pyramid interface
  • Lite management of the cubes can be driven Pyramid's backstage (see below)

PowerPivot Dashboards

Once uploaded, users can take advantage of all the power and sophistication afforded by Pyramid's bioXL analytic and bioPoint dashboard toolsets. And with a few more clicks, they can share the analytic and dashboard content with other users. In fact, the whole process is so streamlined, that its entirely possible to go from a raw set of data, to a PowerPivot cube, to analytics and a shared dashboard in under an hour - and often less! Other benefits include:

  • Easy, web-based connections to cubes without requiring the cube and associated data to be downloaded to the desktop (like Excel). So cubes are hosted on a common server without ever having to re-download them again for analysis.
  • Web-based reporting content management written against these cubes can be easily shared across the enterprise.
  • All of the ad-hoc analytics and querying power of bioXL against the cubes from the convenience of a web-deployed client. This includes a world class visualization framework; state-of-the-art MDX functionality; custom element logic and the ability to incorporate such content into dashboards in the bioPoint application, side-by-side with other queries written against other cube data sources.

The resulting BI solution offers an ideal toolset to scale the power of “instant analytics” to the needs of the enterprise.

Click here to read more.

Tabular Cube Management

Authorized end users can drive cube creation and deployment through the Pyramid PowerPivot upload. During this process, they also have the opportunity to assign read access for the cube to other Pyramid users; assign processing rights (for refreshing the cube's data) and general administration rights.

This functionality, together with the uploader, provides the quantum leap needed for transforming a self-service BI platform into an enterprise BI platform.