BI Going Mainstream (Pt. III) – Microsoft

To Microsoft credit, they recognized the growing importance of BI a few years ago and moved to merge what was arguably the best in-house expertise they had in the SQL Server team with the BI/scorecarding experts in the Office team. The newly formed group, named Office Business Applications, lead by Chris Caren from Business Objects has taken the lead with the major BI initiatives that Microsoft has announced over the past year, starting with Business Scorecard Manager, the acquisition of Microsoft-partner ProClarity and finally the long-awaited release of Office 2007. And meanwhile, the SQL Server team continued to push ahead with their own database-centric view of the BI world with major upgrades to their ETL and Reporting/Analysis capabilities (SSIS, SSRS and SSAS respectively).

Whether Microsoft really compete in the enterprise BI space is still a matter of debate. Some would say that Excel is the most widely used BI tool out there. Others would say that Excel doesn’t even fall into their definition of BI. Whatever your perspective, it’s clear that Excel 2007 with it’s shared metadata and Server-based architecture is now looking a lot more like mainstream BI and will be a stronger competitor in the months and years to come.

With the launch of Office 2007 came Performance Point (codenamed Maestro). With it Microsoft has made a serious impact on what was the traditional stomping ground for Hyperion (now Oracle) and Outlooksoft (now SAP). Whether Microsoft will meaningfully compete against these enterprise software giants remains to be seen, but a quick glance at the product does reveal some very compelling features particularly for those who have already made investments in SQL Server-based BI. It allows companies to build organization-wide metrics in SQL Server that can then be dropped into Excel workbooks. Ensuring that end-users not only have a single version of the truth (i.e. data) but also a single set of standardized (and approved) company-wide metrics.