Panorama Business Intelligence

Since the announcement from Microsoft on the discontinuation of PerformancePoint Server, I spent a lot of time talking to customers and partners about it to better understand their perspective. Here are a few of the things I collected:

- Even if Office 14 will end up being the ultimate BI solution, one that will solve all customer dreams about BI (no one really believes that but still…), it is still 12 to 18 months away from launching. This means there is no BI applications from MSFT between now and Office 14. 

- In order to take advantage of the full power of BI in Office 14 customers will actually have to upgrade and use office 14 on the desktop and servers. What we heard is that it can take an enterprise up to 3 years to roll out a new version of office on the desktop and upgrade their SharePoint platform. I was told that the cost of the upgrade of Office is significantly higher than buying a specialized BI tool, and has a much longer ROI. 

- This point is a very interesting one, since we know that only about 10%-20% of the organizations upgrade to the latest Office version every year, so  in  theory 80% to 90% of the market will not be able to take advantage of the new BI capabilities in the first year…. This means that some customers will have to wait 2, 3 years or more to get BI features in Office

- Customers and partners who are intimate with Microsoft were able to say that until very recently there was still a plan to release a second version of PerformancePoint Server…. This means that the strategy change was done recently. Those partners also mentioned the fact that Office does not make changes to the original plans when Beta 1 is so close… So basically no changes could be made to SharePoint to really compensate on the lack of a second version of PerformancePoint Server in such an advanced phase of development…

- Most customers and partners we spoke to acknowledged the fact that SQL Server’s BI strategy with things like Gemini are extremely powerful and will get adopted, but at the same time mentioned the need for a dedicated BI product suite that goes beyond the personal productivity capabilities.

- I heard MANY customers and partner say that “Excel is not a BI tool”. I found this comment to be interesting…. Excel is a spreadsheet that has some BI functionality but it does not replace the need for a full blown BI solution. In a similar way you can’t just run your operations in a basic Access application and still need a specialized ERP tool. Just like you need a specialized tool for ERP same thing for BI.

- I personally asked Microsoft on a webinar today the following question: “What will be the upgrade path for a customer that created reports and views in Proclarity?” the answer was “In office 14 you will still be able to view those reports”…. This means that what Microsoft is offering Proclarity customers with a 5 year old product is to keep using it without any upgrade path or new way to move these reports to a new tool….

I will keep blogging about this as I think this event is a major turning point for customers who are invested in Microsoft based BI technologies. Keep tracking us on http://twitter.com/panoramaSW and follow me on http://twitter.com/oudiantebi