Microsoft Wednesday staked out the future of its business intelligence strategy by unveiling the next version of SQL Server and the performance management layers to be built on top of it.
At the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle, the company unveiled the road map for the next version of SQL Server code-named Katmai; announced the ship date for Office PerformancePoint Server 2007; said it had acquired a company called SoftArtisans and its OfficeWriter software for report authoring in Office; and unveiled a number of partners and independent software vendors that are building business intelligence (BI) software on the Microsoft platform.
The developments highlight Microsoft’s strategy to bring BI to the masses by providing platform services, performance management applications and user interfaces via its Office applications.
“We are unleashing the capability for everyone in an organization to be a first-class citizen in decision making supported by BI,” said Alex Payne, group product manager for Office business applications at Microsoft. “We are changing the way BI gets consumed.”
Observers say what Microsoft is doing is getting its BI story together.
“Microsoft has finally gotten serious about its BI message,” says James Kobielus, principal analyst for data management with Current Analysis. “They are telling the world this is extremely critical and strategic for us as a company.”
Kobielus say Microsoft has been a BI vendor for years with SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services, Analysis Services and Integration Services, and with the de facto client front end in Office Excel. Microsoft also has a number of Business Intelligence Accelerators for Office, and Office 2007 will include BI tools called Excel Services.
“They have some strong BI tools,” he says. “Now they need to let the world know they are serious about continuing to clarify their BI and performance management message.”
One major cog is PerformancePoint Server 2007, a performance management platform that Microsoft said would ship later this year.
The server positions Microsoft against competitors that have been snapping up companies in order to add performance management capabilities to their platforms including, SAP’s acquisition of OutlookSoft earlier this week, Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion in March and Business Object’s acquisition of Cartesis in April.
Microsoft’s PerformancePoint is already in Version 2 of its Community Technology Preview (CTP), which is much like a beta. Microsoft plans two more CTPs before shipping PerformancePoint in “extremely late summer,” but companies such as Energizer and Premier Bankcard are set to deploy PerformancePoint in production.
PerformancePoint stores data and business rules on a centralized server and integrates them with score carding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting tools to help users better understand their businesses. It was formerly code named Biz# (pronounced Biz Sharp).
Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer will be the client-side interfaces into PerformancePoint. The server also will be integrated with portal capabilities via Office’s SharePoint Server and with analytical tools acquired when Microsoft bought ProClarity last year.
Eventually, ProClairty’s Analytics Server will cease to be a separate product, according to Microsoft officials who did not provide a timeline for phasing it out.
Microsoft also plans to integrate the PerformancePoint features directly into future version of its Dynamics ERP financial application suite.
PerformancePoint and the entire BI platform will ride on top of SQL Server and its BI tool set. Microsoft announced the next version of that software, code-named Katmai, will ship sometime in 2008. Katmai will go into a CTP in 60 days, Microsoft said.
Katmai will include features for large-scale data warehousing and integration Office clients such as Word and Excel, and Office servers such as the SharePoint Server data repository. Katmai will manage any type of data, including documents, geographic information and XML.
Microsoft said report-generation capabilities acquired from SoftArtisans would be folded into Katmai’s reporting-services feature.
“You can build reports inside the Office environment and you don’t need to be a developer to do it,” said Microsoft’s Payne.
Katmai also will integrate with the Visual Studio and .Net Framework development environments and allow developers to synchronize data from multiple devices to SQL Server.
Payne also said Microsoft will announce in the coming months specific features being added to the Katmai database engine that will support BI.
“Microsoft’s BI solutions will bring intelligence capabilities to 10 times the number of workers, and we will be able to do that because we deliver BI exactly where the information workers work every day,” said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, during his keynote address to open the conference.
