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.

Read the full story (TDWI)

Gartner: It’s business intelligence 2.0 time

Forget talk of Web 2.0, it’s time for BI 2.0, according to Gartner.

The analyst group has laid out its case for improving the use of business intelligence in enterprises. Speaking at the Gartner BI Summit at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on Tuesday, Gartner vice president for research, Andreas Bitterer, said the next generation of business intelligence (BI) would be defined by what it was not.

To begin with, BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers, said Bitterer. “There are too many BI vendors,” he explained.

Read the full story (ZDNet)

Business Intelligence & Search: A Marriage of Convenience

February 12, 2007 (Computerworld) — Often, a company’s most valuable information is squirreled away in various departmental silos, and it takes an IT or statistics guru to coax it out. But what if workers could get that information — whether it’s in the form of data tables or text — using an interface that’s as easy to use as a Google search box?

That’s the thinking behind the marriage of business intelligence (BI) software and enterprise search technology. It’s an especially powerful concept for a decentralized organization such as the National Education Association (NEA), a teachers union with 3.2 million members and 14,000 state and local affiliates. “We wanted software that allowed people, particularly at the state-level organization, to create and edit their own reports,” says Bill Thompson, the NEA’s director of financial and membership services.

The organization is setting up Fast Radar, a BI/search product from Fast Search and Transfer SA, to give users access to financial, legal, research and membership information that is contained in four separate data silos. A small pilot is being conducted with a few affiliates, and broad deployment is scheduled to start in May. Initially, users will gain point-and-click access to information in the four databases. Later, they will be able to conduct text searches of the BI and text data.

Read the full story (ComputerWorld)

Let the battle for the mid-market commence

Enterprise software vendors have traditionally targeted large Global 3000/FTSE 250 companies with revenues of $1bn+. However, as the competitive pressures in corporates intensify and customers consolidate their suppliers, the “mid-market” is becoming an increasingly attractive target for vendors, especially as it fits well with the emerging SaaS (Software as a Service) business model.

The mid-market is loosely defined as those companies with revenues in the $50m – $500m range. These are typically manufacturing companies and subsidiaries of larger entities. Currently mid-market companies are best served by smaller vendors in performance management area such as Cartesis, Prophix, and Applix, who have all achieved excellent financial results for 2006. Similarly, LogiXML and QlikTech in the business intelligence market have thrived. Judging by their references and testimonials they are all doing a very good job of serving the mid-market.

Read the full story (Channel Register)

Business Intelligence Gets Collaborative

Over the next several years, expect to see the business-intelligence, collaboration and knowledge-management segments converge. Likewise, expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs and wikis revolutionize the business intelligence experience.

Collective intelligence is an organization’s most precious asset. It’s what makes the difference between a successful enterprise, one that can pool its expertise to address common opportunities and threats, and a competitive also-ran.

Read the full story (NewsFactor)

Search the nascent giant of Enterprise 2.0

The role of search is expanding fast. As Web-type search moves from the Internet to inside the Enterprise for semantic analysis, it begins to identify facts inside documents, combines the information with structured databases, and provides true knowledge discovery.

As analytics are increasingly derived from search, users can relate concepts to enable people to make decisions and get completeness and overview — on the fly — to provide, in essence, search-powered business intelligence (BI). The mega trends of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and the Semantic Web give search more content to consider, and much more power.

Read the full story (Dana Gardner – ZDNet)

SOA moves toward event handling

BEM is a way to get machines to alert people when a business process is going wrong and needs human attention to get back on track.

 ”Business event management is the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution based on the business context of the events,” according to Forrester’s definition.

Read the full story (TechTarget)

The SOA forecast for 2007

For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang – two major snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that’s keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of year. Even more so, it’s football season in the US and both the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens are in the playoffs – the two teams representing ZapThink’s two office locations. Of course, speaking metaphorically, with regards to SOA, 2006 ended with a bang and 2007 is already showing considerable warmth and competitive vigor. ZapThink has seen SOA take off even more aggressively than we anticipated at the beginning of 2006, and all indications show that SOA strength will be further reinforced and expanded in 2007 to many corners of the IT environment, throughout the world and in many different industries. And so, during this season of sultry winter weather and competition, it is time to evaluate our predictions from the previous year and forecast the architectural and competitive climate for SOA in 2007.

Read the full story (TechTarget)

Making sense of Microsoft Collaboration

Herein lies the problem: While Microsoft talks about building a seamless, pervasive collaboration platform, many analysts and users complain that the company has done a poor job of clearly sorting out and positioning the many product pieces that constitute that strategy. They believe there are some pieces that overlap each other in terms of core functions and they don’t get an adequate feel for the company’s long-term commitment to some components.

What seem most perplexing to some industry observers are the various communication products and how they might work in concert with server and desktop productivity software to form a more overarching set of solutions. This has contributed to a rather fractured view among users as to the breadth of the company’s actual collaboration strategy.

Read the full story (Redmond Magazine)

BI for the Great Unwashed

Makers of business intelligence software are dreaming of a day when their products will run on every desktop. But will this ever come to pass? Quocirca’s Louella Fernandes explains.

The ultimate goal of business intelligence is to drive better business performance through providing the right data at the right time. However, implementing a business intelligence (BI) platform can be costly and complex to use and deploy. Traditional BI solutions are often only used by a small proportion of users – the analysts and power users – and even then, the tools can be difficult to use.

With Office 2007, Microsoft aims to address the unrealised potential use of BI in an organisation by applying its low-cost, high-volume approach to the market. But whilst Microsoft may indeed increase the awareness of BI tools, achieving mainstream BI adoption still faces many challenges.

Read the full story (Silicon.com/Quocirca)