Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Coming into Focus

Microsoft Corp.’s PerformancePoint Server 2007 offering might still be incubating, but it’s not as if the software giant ever shied away from trumpeting soon-and-inevitably-to-be-hatched-products in the past.

And with last week’s release of a new PerformancePoint Community Technology Preview (CTP), Microsoft has at least a plausible reason to crow.

PerformancePoint, Redmond’s long-awaited performance management (PM) entry, could do for PM what SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) did for OLAP and reporting, respectively: take it mainstream. Last week, Microsoft officials outlined PerformancePoint licensing and pricing information, discussed the fate of the former ProClarity Corp.’s assets (a number of which have been incorporated into PerformancePoint), talked up the mainstreaming of PM in general, and seemed confident that Microsoft will deliver its inaugural PM suite on time—in the second half of 2007.

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Oracle updates BI Suite

Oracle this week is shipping an updated version of its business intelligence suite that enhances integration with both Oracle and non-Oracle products, and adds features including a tool that can automatically begin a business process based on pre-determined thresholds.

For example, if a company’s inventory drops below a certain level, Oracle tools can now be set to order more supplies without human intervention, says Rick Schultz, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware. A company can also require that humans be involved in the transaction after the automated business intelligence alert is sent out.

“Customers are more and more wanting to integrate intelligence into business processes. This enables customers to do that,” Schultz says. “You can do it completely automated, or you can integrate human workflow.”

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Microsoft releases pint sized SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition is the next version of SQL Server Mobile adding the desktop platform.

SQL Server Compact extends the SQL Server Mobile technology by offering a low maintenance, compact embedded database for single-user client applications for all Windows platforms including tablet PCs, pocket PCs, smart phones and desktops. Just as with SQL Server Mobile, SQL Server Compact is a free, easy-to-use, lightweight, and embeddable version of SQL Server 2005 for developing desktop and mobile applications.

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Cognos gets SaaSy with Salesforce.com

Cognos has joined salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the first on-demand directory and sharing service for business applications. With Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) now listed on AppExchange, Salesforce Winter ‘07 customers will be able to learn how the zero-footprint, enterprise-class reporting and analysis capabilities can enable them to gain greater insight and understanding into sales and marketing initiatives.

This announcement supports Cognos’ vision of pervasive BI, making BI accessible to more people and enabling higher adoption of business intelligence for enhanced decision making and improved organizational performance. Cognos’ BI solution delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. Now a new class of users, salesforce.com customers, can leverage a complete and proven BI solution to extend the value of information across the organization and gain answers to new business questions in the context of other corporate information.

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Microsoft Report Builder Road Test

Microsoft first released Reporting Services in January 2004. It was slated to debut as part of SQL Server 2005, but given the repeated delays of that product and the solid capabilities in Reporting Services, Microsoft accelerated the offering as a free download to SQL Server 2000 customers. Reporting Services was positioned as a tool for IT developers, not business users. Authoring is done on the desktop using Business Intelligence Development Studio, a shell within Visual Studio 2005. Developers create queries using a graphical query builder that lets them join tables (similar to Microsoft Access) or, for more advanced queries, write custom SQL statements.

To address the needs of business authors, Microsoft released Report Builder in November 2005 as part of SQL Server 2005. It relies on the same Reporting Services infrastructure as reports authored in Visual Studio. Report Builder has let Microsoft compete more directly with BI pure-play vendors, but this first attempt at addressing business-user reporting needs doesn’t measure up to the competition in terms of flexibility, data access or, surprisingly, Office integration.

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The skinny on EnterpriseDB

The first thing that EnterpriseDB has done is to introduce Oracle compatibility. The aim here is to allow Oracle applications to run against EnterpriseDB without change; so all of your PL/SQL, all of user defined functions and datatypes, all of your triggers and so on, will all run against EnterpriseDB without change. In practice, of course, this is not perfect. The company estimates that around 75% of its Oracle migrations (it also has customers that have migrated from SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL) have required no changes at all but there remains a rump of 25% that do need some changes, typically when these companies are using RAC or the OCI interface or other advanced Oracle features, though we can expect EnterpriseDB to address these issues in future releases.

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Top 10 "Free" BI Applications

Sourceforge.net is a repository of free open source software, and a lot of it applies to e-business. We’ve compiled this list of the top 10 most popular business intelligence (BI) applications available on the site. Click on the product name to get more information and download links straight from Sourceforge.

JasperReports: “JasperReports, the market leading open source business intelligence and reporting engine. This project is being moved to http://www.jasperforge.org/. This project is the home for all things Jasper, Reports, Analysis, Server, and Intelligence.”

Pentaho: ” A complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL). Use it as a full suite or as individual components that are accessible via web services.”

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IBM and Yahoo Bring Free Enterprise Search Tool

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-cost, entry level enterprise search product developed to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to intranet and Web search. Unlike other enterprise search solutions that can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and implement, the new offering from IBM with Web search services powered by Yahoo! can be downloaded for free and is simple to install and use with existing hardware.

 ”Together, IBM and Yahoo! are delivering on the promise of making information easier to find, use and share while providing a better search experience for users,” said Eckart Walther, vice president of product management for Yahoo! Search. “This is a valuable tool for helping organizations improve employee productivity by enabling them to more quickly find needed information. By empowering customers and partners to quickly find information on the Web, we’re also able to reduce their support costs.”

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Pentaho Introduces Web-Based Ad Hoc Query and Reporting

 With Pentaho’s new open source metadata capabilities, administrators can define a layer of abstraction that presents database information to business users in familiar business terms. Administrators identify relationships between tables in the database, create business-language definitions for complex or cryptic database tables and columns, set security parameters to limit data access to appropriate users, specify default formatting for data fields, and provide additional translations for business terms for multi-lingual deployments. Business users can then use Pentaho’s new ad hoc query capabilities to choose the specific elements they would like to include in a given report, such as order quantities and total spending by customer grouped by region.

The new web-based query interface uses AJAX technology to provide a highly interactive, easy to use, scalable front end. The application’s metadata layer was built using the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) standard created by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to allow for interoperability with existing metadata stores as well as third-party databases, metadata repositories, and ETL tools. Pentaho’s metadata-driven query engine uses JDBC and ANSI standard SQL to allow for the broadest possible choice of proprietary and open source databases including Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and others. Pentaho’s metadata will also be accessible in the near future from Pentaho’s open source graphical report designer, and the Pentaho Design Studio.

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Cognos Previews Cognos 8 Go! Mobile

BURLINGTON, Mass., Sept. 25 — Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today previewed Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, a new BI solution that will bring decision-support information directly to mobile device users for right-time decision making. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile represents Cognos’ next milestone in making BI accessible to more people and enabling higher adoption of business intelligence for enhanced decision making and improved organizational performance.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. To further enable faster and more effective decisions, Cognos offers additional access options that bring BI to familiar working environments of every worker. Cognos 8 Go! Search helps users easily and instantly find strategic BI metrics and information. Cognos 8 Go! Office lets users view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft® Excel®, PowerPoint® and Word. Previewed today, Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will help users make more informed decisions in context to quickly improve individual effectiveness and organizational performance when mobile, while enabling IT to further leverage existing investments in Cognos 8 BI to continue lowering the overall cost of ownership.

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