Microsoft adds business intelligence server to Office lineup

Microsoft on Tuesday added yet another server to its Office 2007 lineup, this one focused on spreading business analytic tools across a corporation.

The Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 will go into beta in November and ship in mid-2007. It puts data and business rules on a centralized server and integrates them with scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting tools to help users better understand their businesses. PerformancePoint was formerly code-named Biz# (pronounced Biz Sharp).

Microsoft is hoping a centralized business intelligence platform that incorporates the popular Office applications will steer users away from a myriad of competitive platforms and standalone BI tools in favor of an integrated platform from a single vendor.

Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer will be the client side interfaces into PerformancePoint. The server also will be integrated with portal capabilities via SharePoint Server due to ship with Office 2007 later this year.

Microsoft also plans to integrate the PerformancePoint features directly into future version of its Dynamics ERP financial application suite.

“This is bringing together a lot of things we have been working with,” says Tim Case, CIO of Combe, which manufactures personal care products. Case, speaking during a Microsoft Webcast to announce PerformancePoint, said Combe is working with SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Reporting Services and is in the process of converting its data from SQL Server 2000 to the new 2005 version.

“But the final piece that really helped out was when we took a look at the user layer, and with the extension of Excel, we had a really easy migration path,” said Case, who added his biggest complaint from end-users is that current tools in use at Combe are not user friendly.

Microsoft’s efforts to date on business intelligence infrastructure have focused around SQL Server, which includes data integration services, analytical queries, data mining and reporting services. Microsoft also has a number of Business Intelligence Accelerators for Office, and Office 2007 will include BI tools called Excel Services.

Microsoft is incorporating its Business Scorecard Manager with analytic and visualization technologies from ProClarity, which it acquired in April. The ProClarity Analytics Server lets users publish collections of views onto a middleware server for centralized access to analytical information.

PerformancePoint also includes a feature called Business Modeler, which lets business analysts manage rules, roles, and workflows without involvement from IT.

Microsoft’s push deeper into BI will accelerate its competition with vendors such as IBM and Oracle, but also put it at odds with partners in the BI market.

“We are seeing a strong demand to evolve BI to have better supported decision making, better support of collaborative analysis and to bring together structured and unstructured information,” said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division. Raikes introduced PerformancePoint during the Tuesday afternoon Webcast. He said it is time for BI to move from a backward view of what has happened to a more real-time view of what is currently happening.