Under the deal Panorama will integrate its analytics and reporting system with Astea’s Alliance Analytics, the company’s business intelligence application. According to Astea, this means it ability to provide historical and near real time business intelligence and performance data to its customers will be significantly enhanced.

The deal gives Astea a tool that helps its product deliver business analytics to customers, allowing them to exploit better the large volumes of data that the field service system generates, according to Frank Fesnak, the company’s vice president of strategic alliances.  'Before, all we had was a basic reporting function, you could generate various types of reports against all the data that our system collects, but now our customers and users can analyse the data, slice and dice it, and make strategic decisions based on it,’ he said.

He went on to say that the combined Panorama and Astea products will move his company’s offering from one that is purely operational field services, into the strategic arena, helping to change and evolve service management businesses.  Lee Ho, the VP of worldwide marketing at Panorama Software, feels that the move represents a trend for people in the customer facing market to begin to offer back-end data analysis packages.

Asked about what his company's product will bring to Astea customers, he said: ‘It’s that "how thing". How can you change this? How is it that in this particular region a company is making good results, and how can it improve on that, that’s what we are providing.'