Microsoft BI is delivered through three layers or workloads: data warehousing, reporting and analysis, and performance management. These are designed to provide a consolidated, comprehensive data source and tools to help improve decision making. In our view, the promise of Microsoft BI is to help decision makers at all levels throughout your organization have confidence that their decisions support your company’s goals and initiatives.
The challenge and promise of business intelligence revolves around providing employees with the right information, at the right time to accomplish a specific goal. Making this promise a reality demands a business intelligence solution that is comprehensive, secure, integrated with operational systems, and available all day, every day. SQL Server helps companies to achieve this goal with SQL Server 2005.
PerformancePoint Server 2007
PerformancePoint Server 2007 will include server components, client applications, and modeling utilities to help companies track business performance and streamline financial reporting and budgeting. The product targets large and midsize companies and builds on familiar Microsoft technologies, such as Windows SharePoint Server (WSS), SQL Server, and Office (particularly Excel). The product focuses on three main areas:
Performance management tools gather and summarize business data from a variety of sources (including SQL Server databases), define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) based on those data, and display those KPIs in scorecards on SharePoint sites. (PerformancePoint will work with WSS 3.0, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and SharePoint Server 2007.) These features extend those delivered in BSM 2005, which was released in Nov. 2005.
Advanced data analysis and visualization features are based on tools and technologies that Microsoft acquired when it purchased ProClarity in the first half of 2006.
Financial analysis and reporting, budgeting, and forecasting utilities include a tool called Business Modeler that lets business users create financial reporting or budgeting models from underlying data sources (such as a company's general ledger), define business rules (how revenue is attributed, for instance), and specify process workflow (such as the review and approval steps for a budgeting process). PerformancePoint Server 2007 will enter a relatively crowded field that includes veteran players such as Cognos and Hyperion. Despite favorable pricing, PerformancePoint Server is in many ways a version 1.0 product, and Microsoft could initially find it difficult to compete with those more experienced vendors, especially among large companies with advanced IT skills and deep pockets. However, the combination of PerformancePoint Server's promised ease-of-use, integration with the familiar Office suite (particularly Excel), and low cost could make it a compelling buy among midsize companies, particularly those that have not yet made major investments in performance management applications.
PPS Analytics Vision
Provide business users with a seamless organizational-analytics experience throughout the performance management lifecycle to enable timely and accurate business decisions.
PPS Monitoring Components
- Scorecard/Dashboard Builder
- Rich, intuitive design and build experience
- Office 2007 look and feel
- Wizard-driven Formal performance management scorecards
- Web-based scorecards Hierarchical scorecard views
- Strategy maps
- Balanced scorecard certified
- Contextual report views
Free Upgrade for BSM, ProClarity Customers
In Jan. 2007, Microsoft announced that it is adopting a server plus Client Access License (CAL) model for PerformancePoint, the same model currently used for BSM 2005 and ProClarity. PerformancePoint Server 2007 pricing is almost identical to that of ProClarity. The server license for PerformancePoint Server 2007 will cost US$20,000 and CALs weigh in at US$195. (BSM 2005 server licenses cost US$5,000 and CALs are US$175.)
In addition, PerformancePoint Server 2007 will offer a US$30,000 External Connector license that allows organizations to give an unlimited number of nonemployees access to PerformancePoint. For example, a large manufacturer could use the license to allow its suppliers and distributors to input data to aid PerformancePoint budgeting and forecasting, without the manufacturer having to purchase CALs for those suppliers and distributors.
Business intelligence advancements include:
- Integrated platform. Building on SQL Server 2005 delivers an end-to-end business intelligence platform with integrated analytics including online analytical processing (OLAP); data mining; extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tools; data warehousing; and reporting functionality. This comprehensive, integrated approach helps enable organizations to seamlessly build and deploy robust business intelligence applications while controlling costs.
- Improved decision making. Advancements to existing business intelligence features, such as OLAP and data mining, and the introduction of a new reporting server provides enterprises with the ability to transform information into better business decisions at all organizational levels, from the information worker to the CEO.
- Security and availability. Scalability, availability, and security enhancements help provide users with uninterrupted access to business intelligence applications and reports.
- Enterprise-wide analytical capabilities. An improved ETL tool enables organizations to more easily integrate and analyze data from multiple heterogeneous information sources. By analyzing data across a wide array of operational systems, organizations may gain a competitive edge through a holistic understanding of their business.
SQL Server 2005 provides many new and enhanced business intelligence (BI) features designed to give you a competitive advantage. These advantages include integrating multiple data sources with Integration Services; enriching data and building complex business analytics with Analysis Services; and writing, managing, and delivering rich reports with Reporting Services. Review the following product and technical resources and other information designed to help you improve BI in your organization.
- Integrate: Easily integrate data from a wide range of operational and enterprise data sources, and gain competitive advantage through a holistic view of your business.
- Analyze: Gain an integrated view of all your business data as the foundation for your traditional reporting, OLAP analysis, scorecards, and data mining.
- Report: Deliver the information employees need to make better business decisions—in virtually any business environment.
- Data Mining: Explore data, discover patterns, and apply these patterns to business operations with an easy-to-use, extensible, accessible, and flexible platform.
- Data Warehousing: Leverage enhancements in partitioning, manageability and query optimizations to streamline operations and increase performance.
Leveraging Business Intelligence - Microsoft Demo
- Four Data Warehousing and BI webcasts, presented by Kimball Group
In June and July, the Kimball Group, pioneers in data warehousing, demonstrate, step-by-step, how the SQL Server 2005 platform solves the tough issues faced in implementing DW and BI applications.
- SQL Server 2005 End-to-End Business Intelligence Demo
View this 10-minute demo to see how easily existing Visual Studio developers can add sophisticated business intelligence capabilities such as integration, analysis, and reporting into their applications.
- Unisys and Microsoft Present a Series of Events Focused on Business Intelligence
The Project REAL Technology Series highlights a live demo from Project REAL using a robust 2TB data warehouse. Each session is an in-depth dive where you can ask questions of the experts from Microsoft, Unisys, and other BI partners.
Microsoft Technical Resources
Microsoft BI stacks Hot Downloads