Panintelligence

Panintelligence has built its business around the reality that knowledge is power. A UK-based software company, Panintelligence provides highly intuitive business intelligence (BI) solutions to customers across a range of industries, including business solutions, distribution and logistics, education, fraud prevention and payments, IT, marketing, and services industries. The Panintelligence dashboard is a business intelligence application that can span multiple databases, allowing users to access their data in real time and help them to make better-informed decisions. 

A large educational software provider to the international education, training and learning markets, is a strategic OEM partner for Panintelligence, embedding the dashboard within its student information management system and its learning management information system. Additionally, the customer uses Panintelligence’s software internally for visibility across its own operations.

The education provider uses the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage activity for its 300 sales professionals, including history, leads and pipeline development. To gain critical information and insight into its sales channel, the provider has historically relied on the reports included within Salesforce. While the reports proved valuable at providing big-picture analysis and information, the data was limited and the customer wanted the ability to dig deeper and access more detailed information.

Panintelligence recommended that they implement a new driver to connect its BI software with Salesforce. Doing so would give the customer far more flexibility when it came to analyzing and reporting on its Salesforce data. The customer agreed to a proof of concept, but first, Panintelligence had to either develop or find the new driver.

Panintelligence considered a number of options, including writing its own connector. “We estimated it would have taken us at least six months to build a Salesforce API connector, and then we would have been responsible for maintaining the connector. We concluded www.progress. com that our time and resources were far better spent developing differentiating features for our own applications,” explains Ken Miller, Product Director for Panintelligence Ltd. 

Panintelligence evaluated a number of third-party vendors, including Simba, RSS Bus and Progress DataDirect. “It was clear from our evaluation that the Progress DataDirect JDBC for Salesforce driver was head and shoulders better than the other drivers out there,” says Miller. “There were so many things we just couldn’t do with the other solutions; they proved to be quite limited, whereas, everything we tried with Progress DataDirect delighted us.”

Miller says there were a number of things Panintelligence tested against in its evaluation. “For one, we did not want to be using a lot of API calls when we queried a single element within our structure, and that absolutely doesn’t happen with DataDirect. From a performance standpoint, Progress DataDirect is optimised quite perfectly. DataDirect was also able to successfully handle Case statements and other SQL commands. And the DataDirect JDBC driver allows the easy return of custom objects from SFDC. There was no other driver out there other than DataDirect that could handle those requirements.”

Within just hours of demonstrating the Progress DataDirect driver for Salesforce to the customer, Panintelligence was able to yield some very significant data that the customer was not getting through the Salesforce interface. “In just a couple of hours we were finding things in their Salesforce data that they didn’t know existed, for example, a number of opportunities that were listed incorrectly. Over the two days we were there, we created lists of exceptions, some of which were just data cleansing issues, but others were far more serious.”

For example, using the Progress DataDirect driver with the Panintelligence BI software, they uncovered the fact that approximately 25 percent of the data was incorrectly listed, either due to misspelling or misallocation. That information was not clear within Salesforce and those opportunities were not showing up in reports. Using DataDirect, Panintelligence was able to pull all of those exceptions into the BI tool and compare the information to the rest of the Salesforce data. “Using Progress DataDirect, it took us just 20 minutes to combine the data back together in Salesforce and suddenly the customer had visibility into 25 percent more opportunities.”

Miller says Panintelligence clearly made the right decision choosing Progress DataDirect. “The results have been impressive. We were able to decrease our time to market by 5X using DataDirect versus building our own connector. And we are able to build a proof of concept within just hours to demonstrate the value to our customers. From the development side of our business this is very exciting.”

Panintelligence plans to introduce the new DataDirect JDBC for Salesforce driver to its existing customer base and expects to close two to three deals within the next six months. “Our relationship with Progress has given us a strategic opportunity to add value to our existing customers and a competitive advantage with new prospects,” says Miller. “If we had a preferred supplier list Progress would certainly be on it. We will use DataDirect for any future connector needs; that’s a no-brainer.”

Panintelligence is exploring the possibility of partnering with Progress to build a DataDirect driver for Sage200 Online within their BI offering using the Progress® DataDirect® OpenAccess™ SDK. Panintelligence is the only Sage Certified BI vendor on the Sage Additions list. The company already offers a standard connector for the on-premise Sage 200 so users can gain visibility into their balance sheet and transactions, and make sense of their business at a global level. Panintelligence is looking to provide that same level of insight for Sage’s cloud-based offering.

The company is also considering embedding a Progress DataDirect JDBC connector for MongoDB within their BI solution to demo at the upcoming MongoDB World conference in London. “This would be another great opportunity we can take advantage of with Progress DataDirect where we can show that our solution offers a level of performance unmatched in the industry,” says Miller. “We are very confident that we can achieve what we need to achieve–now and in the future with Progress DataDirect.”