Ten years ago, when Microsoft bought Panorama to enter the Business Intelligence market space, many thought that Microsoft would instantly dominate the arena. It has taken a little longer but here they are ten years later– Microsoft is a long term player and Steve Ballmer has made it clear in his key note speech at the first ever Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle at the beginning of May.“We are dead serious“ he said.
Super excited” and “enthused” where two of the most used terms Microsoft speakers used on stage to convey the message: Microsoft has arrived at a mature stage with their BI stack now and are ready, not only to compete in the Business Intelligence market, but to deliver “BI to the masses”. And indeed the level of integration of BI functionality into everyday desktop products like Word or Excel and the significantly lower price point compared to other vendors is likely to broaden the usage of Business Intelligence Systems within organizations as well as towards smaller size enterprises.

2800 attendees from 65 countries followed Microsoft’s invitation to benefit from a very comprehensive and concentrated conference program with plenty of opportunities to speak to Microsoft executives, peers from other organizations and partners.Robert Kaplan the well renowned co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard and Harvard Professor and Michael Treacy inspired a packed full auditorium with their keynote speeches on Balanced Scorecard and Value Disciplines, both emphasizing the need for disciplined performance management for those organizations who want to excel.One of the highlights of the conference was PerformancePoint Server. Long awaited and the last missing piece to a “closed loop performance management architecture”, PerformancePoint Server represents a robust process driven application platform for planning, forecasting, consolidation and business scorecards. PerformancePoint Server builds on SQL Server and Analysis Services also integrating the recently acquired ProClarity analytics front-end and provides with a set of predefined business intelligence, deployed to the different user groups via the familiar Excel and SharePoint environments.

As a former CFO Peter Bull, Microsoft’s Principal Group Program Manager for Office Business Solutions, was well equipped to give an impressive demonstration of a typical budgeting and forecasting process all based on workflows and business features that will be close to the hearts of all the controllers who have struggled putting a budget together in Excel.

One weak point however seems to be the web capability for data acquisition in planning and forecasting. We are waiting to see how Excel Services will solve this issue or whether third parties will embark on creating solutions to close this gap.

Although not released yet – the announced global release is October of this year – Microsoft are boasting over a dozen early adopters already. One of them a pmOne customer in Germany. So a good adoption rate from the very start should be likely.The pricing – around 20.000 Euros for the server and around 190 Euros per user on top of the MS SQL Server environment – will be a real challenge for Hyperion, Cognos and the likes in the mid and upper midmarkets, but will probably hold smaller companies from embarking on this journey soon.Another conference highlight was Jeff Raikes’ presentation of Katmai, the next generation of Microsofts SQL Server, due in 2008. It will include capabilities for large scale data warehousing improved features for real time data warehousing and richer information delivery through Microsoft Office and users  will be able to store any type of data, including unstructured in Katmai.

Jeff Raikes also announced the acquisition of SoftArtisans report authoring product to be included in Katmai and future Office versions, allowing Microsoft Office users to create functional reports within their familiar Excel, Word or Powerpoint environment and publishing them via Reporting Services without losing their connection to the database. That will bring back control of the reporting environment on reporting services from the IT to the finance and business departments.All together Microsoft could convey the impression of a very complete business intelligence product stack, a very dedicated and experienced team delivering affordable and ever improving business intelligence and corporate performance management solutions.