Panorama Business Intelligence

The last 3 years were the most important years in the Business Intelligence market. Companies were acquired and merged, BI has become a strategic initiative to most CIOs around the globe and Microsoft has decided to make BI a strategic initiative for the years to come.

At first it seemed very confusing, Proclarity was acquired, PerformancePoint was released, Proclairty was then retired as a stand alone product and PerformancePoint become a component in SharePoint as opposed to a stand alone product…

While at first glance it might have all seemed as a zigzag on the Microsoft part, it is now clear it was all part of a well defined strategy lead by some of the smartest people in the BI space.

So why will Microsoft win? Because of 2 main reasons:

They are not building standalone BI products anymore but instead making Office and MOSS better productivity products that also include BI functionality. Instead of trying to convince the world that casual users, information workers need to look for new ways of doing things they simply need to keep using the products they already use which just get better and better and now offer ways to analyze, visualize and report on data…. This is brilliant. Someone once said, “If Mohammed doesn’t come to the mountain, the mountain will come to him”. That’s exactly what MSFT is doing to bring BI to the masses.

They work with ISV partners. Microsoft knows what it does best and that is get software to the masses. With Office and MOSS 80% of the organization will be able to use BI, something they weren’t doing before. But Microsoft also realizes it can’t do it all to perfection. So they endorse ISVs such as Panorama to complete the stack when more specific and advanced functionality is required. It is difficult for Microsoft to try to compete with Oracle, SAP and Qliktech on the power user requirements while at the same time push BI to the masses. So tightening the partnership with ISVs that take what they do best – Power features, combine it with the Office, MOSS and SQL stack and bring it all to market as one solution will be the second reason why MSFT will win.