The earthquake Microsoft created in the BI world

[binboy]

AN interesting read on microsofts anouncement that it will not have a future version of PerformancePoint Server

http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=129

[zamir]

That's a fascinating blog entry. It's so good here is the whole thing.

The only warning is that the author works for a leading MSFT shop so some of the views are very MSFT centric (at the expense of other vendors and open source).

First, some facts:

• In 2006, Microsoft picked a strategy to build a dedicated BI product called PerformancePoint Server. The idea was that MSFT will compete with pure play BI vendors such as Panorama, Cognos and others with a complete BI strategy.
• PPS (PerformancePoint Server) included 3 modules, BPF (Budgeting, planning and forecasting), Analytics and Scorecarding.
• Microsoft wanted to make PPS server the “ultimate BI Application suite for the enterprise” by investing in future versions that will focus on making BI better and more competitive when compared with other pure play products.
• The analytics solution in PPS was entirely based on the Proclarity product acquired in April 2006.

What did Microsoft announce today?

• Microsoft will not have a future version of PerformancePoint Server
• Meaning Microsoft has given up on its vision to have a dedicated BI product that will compete with pure play providers.
• Microsoft will not build anymore Budgeting, planning and forecasting solutions and customers will have to rip and replace with other 3rd party products
• There is not going to be any Proclarity product any longer (some Proclarity employees were let go yesterday)
• Scorecard and analytics features will now be developed in SharePoint and branded PerformancePoint Services

What does all this mean?

• Microsoft PerformancePoint Server was NOT a successful product otherwise Microsoft would have not stopped investing in it.
• Microsoft gave up the ambition to be a pure-play competitor for BI application products and instead has decided to add more value to its core Office products, by adding the BI features to them (which is not the same as a full blown BI solution)
• This means that Office users will be able to do SOME analysis and SOME scorecarding but not expect to get the full BI functionality that can replace products from companies like Panorama, Business Objects or Cognos
• Microsoft is going back to the roots of being a platform provider (SQL Server as a leading BI platform with new innovations on that side)

Why won’t SharePoint be a great alternative for pure-play BI products?

• There is a major difference between a “dedicated product” that has a team and a budget to take the product forward vs. a product that has many different features in different areas and all “compete” on mindshare and investment.
• On the current upcoming version of SharePoint as well as future versions, BI feature have to “compete” on resources vs. investments in search, collaboration, workflow and portal features which have a higher demand in the market.
• This means that the amount of BI functionality and pace of innovation will much more limited.
• Microsoft basically decided to combine the products TO SAVE COSTS and fired many from the BI team, this means LESS investment in BI when compared to last year and will result in LESS BI capabilities from MSFT.

What should you do and expect in the future:

• First and foremost, BI now will be part of Office 14. So whether or not you will like the features of MSFT BI in SharePoint and Office you will have to upgrade to the new stack.
• For those that do go through the upgrade, they can expect to get some good value from SharePoint and Office for BI if looking for BASIC and departmental BI features that can be used lightly in the organization.
• For companies or ISVs that are OK developing their own BI solution SharePoint, as well as other MS products like Visio, Excel, Reporting services are a great toolset to use to build a custom solution
• For customers who are looking for a full enterprise BI solution, Microsoft WILL NOT be a good solution. As such a solution needs to have a dedicated focus, which MSFT just gave up on!
• Customers that invested in the MSFT BI PLATFORM (SQL) should stick to it as it is by far the most powerful and capable BI platform today
• Customers should now look at 3rd party solutions like ours to ensure they chose the best product that has the lowest TCO and the fastest ROI and “time to production”, that can work best on top of the existing platform investments.
• Customers of Proclarity should look for companies that can migrate them to a new solution in the cheapest way (Warning… Advertising…. Panorama does that).

Would love to hear you thoughts.

Check us up on http://twitter.com/panoramaSW

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[Steve Bennett]

Yes, I have to say I didn't expect this.

Gartner has been advocating MSFT as the big disrupter of the BI vendor world. Maybe after BOBJ and Cognos got swallowed-up they thought that they has done their job?

Ultimately, MSFT is still in the BI game - just on a stack focussed firmly on their office products. You could argue that this is the natural extension of their 3 year-old strategy to embed BI into word and excel. It always depended on them being able to either streamline the BI components into office so that it wasn't too clunky for the average user or beefing-up the Reporting/Analytic Services so that the BI professionals could do the grunt work, leaving the end users to play around, unaware of the behind-the-scenes efforts necessary.

If it works it could dominate the industry in the coming years. You would have to have a pretty compelling BI need to justify investments in other BI stacks (like SAP, Oracle or IBM) if you can get 50% of what you want simply by turning on Word and Excel.

Thanks binboy for bringing Oudi Antebi's blog to my attention. He has something interesting to say.

[binboy]

Another take

I found this olpreport.com

Commentary: The false dawn of Microsoft PerformancePoint Planning

You can contact Nigel Pendse, the author of this section, by e-mail on NigelP@olapreport.com if you have any comments, observations or user experiences to add. Last updated on January 23, 2009.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 was announced publicly on June 6, 2006. It included several existing Microsoft products, including the home-grown Business Scorecard Manager and the then recently acquired ProClarity, as well as acquired components like FRx from its Dynamics product line.

But the big news was the all-new planning and consolidation component, which had been under development in secrecy since 2003, under the Biz# code-name. This was to be a high-end financial analytical application which focused initially on budgeting, planning and management consolidation, with additional financial consolidation features to be added in later releases. Unlike most other CPM vendors, Microsoft planned to integrate planning, budgeting, consolidation, scorecards and reporting into one single product, not a suite of loosely integrated components.

This new planning product was built on SQL Server and Office, using both Analysis Services and SQL Server, as well as Excel and SharePoint. But it was a substantial project in its own right, much more than just an application template. We were first briefed on it in April 2004, and had mixed feelings: it was clearly an ambitious project that should, eventually, be a very scalable, sophisticated solution. But we feared that it would take several releases, and years of development, to have the full range of necessary functionality. And we were confused at which market Microsoft was aiming it at.

We commented in our preview in September 2007, before the first release, that:

Unlike Oracle, Business Objects and Cognos, Microsoft decided against entering the planning and consolidation markets through acquisition … but decided instead to develop its own product from scratch. This was a brave move, as market entry was delayed by several years, the initial product is bound to be less functional, and there is less certainty about the result. Indeed, the Biz# project has duly suffered delays, and PerformancePoint is now probably about a year behind its original, rather optimistic, internal schedule (with some of the delays being due to the relatively late decision to add ProClarity to the mix). The potential benefit of this start-from-scratch approach is that Microsoft enters the market with a clean new product, with no inherited weaknesses or historical baggage.

But the bigger problem that we saw was that this was clearly intended to compete with Hyperion’s financial applications, and was at least as complex as those products, while being much less complete. It looked like the sort of product that could be sold by a focused financial analytical applications sales team, not Microsoft’s generalist, technical sales teams. The PerformancePoint sales people would require hands-on experience of planning and consolidation applications, and the ability to empathize with the CFO and controller’s problems, not the CIO. Consultants who implemented it would also need considerable skills in this application area, as well as in Microsoft’s BI products.

We just couldn’t see how this could fit into Microsoft’s mass market model, where products need to be easy to deploy, simple to use, inexpensive and suitable for organizations of all sizes.

The first release
Eventually, after repeated delays, PerformancePoint Server 2007 was finally released in late 2007. Arguably, it was both late but also released too early — it seems that management pressure forced the release, whether or not it was ready.

It got an early boost as Software Assurance-paying ProClarity customers qualified for a free upgrade to it. In theory, this could have led to a very quick ramp up of the number of users of the new Planning component.

After all, all ProClarity customers already have SQL Server, including Analysis Services, and Excel, so the new planning component would not only be an excellent technical fit, but provided at little or no additional cost. Even if the first release was incomplete, the familiarity with the rest of the Microsoft stack should compensate. And gaps in functionality could be plugged using other features in Excel and SQL Server.

The release of PerformancePoint certainly seems to have shaken the market: in quick order, the three most obvious competitors, OutlookSoft, Hyperion Solutions and Cognos were taken over. The general feeling was that, even if the first release was unfinished, Microsoft had proven staying power and would get it right by the traditional third release. It could afford to fund the investment, and was certainly in no danger of being taken over. Microsoft had repeatedly shown real tenacity with new products that had initially faltered, and we along with most other people expected PerformancePoint Planning to go the same way.

The abandonment
Despite all the positive auguries, it seems that PerformancePoint Planning has flopped.

Microsoft announced on January 23 that it was to be discontinued. There will be a final SP3 Planning release in mid 2009 to deal with immediate customer issues, but no further enhancements. It is possible that some planning functionality will be added into other Microsoft products, such as Analysis Services and Excel, but this will not be based on the abandoned PerformancePoint Planning product.

The Biz# project will have run for almost six years from commencement to abandonment, with little to show for it apart from some disappointed customers and partners.

What went wrong?
Perhaps this failure was partly because of the product’s complexity. We had commented in our preview that, “both building and using models is more technical than we would like. The clunky user interface certainly requires more work … application development with PerformancePoint may be more laborious and hit-or-miss than with more mature products”.

One particular problem is that PerformancePoint includes very sophisticated currency conversion and partial ownership capabilities to support its intended future role for financial consolidation. But while the first release burdens the planning user with a lot of irrelevant consolidation options, it is not yet complete enough for serious consolidation applications. It also has less budgeting functionality than major competitors. In fact, it even lacks web-based data entry, an omission almost unheard of in any modern planning product.

Another problem is that a version 1.0 product like PerformancePoint Planning (unlike the other, much more mature, PerformancePoint components) needs quick follow-up releases to respond to early customer feedback. But Microsoft had linked it to the multi-year Office release schedules, which are entirely suitable for widely deployed, mature products like Office, but entirely unsuitable for an incomplete young product like PerformancePoint Planning. This means that early adopters of PerformancePoint Planning would have to wait years for critical new features, without which their applications might be unusable.

Furthermore, the target market for a high-end product like Biz# is small and already saturated. Only a relatively small number of large multinational businesses need this sort of advanced product, most of which already use CPM suites from other vendors. Such organizations are all Microsoft customers for Windows and Office, and perhaps a few other products (but less commonly BI), but the majority of Microsoft’s customers are in the mid-market, which want simple, low cost, easy to deploy solutions. While Microsoft could price PerformancePoint as low as it liked, there was no getting round the fact that the planning component was an inherently complex application, and quite unlike the tools that make up the rest of the Microsoft BI product line.

In our view, the Biz# project should probably have been abandoned much earlier. Many ambitious research projects suffer this fate, and it is no shame when they do.

The mistake Microsoft made was to plow on even as it became increasingly apparent that this was a troubled project: repeatedly delayed, not well aimed at the market and out of synch with Microsoft’s sales machine. Microsoft can sometimes get away with such mistakes (as with Vista), but it is much harder with an all-new product entering a well-served market where Microsoft is not even present. Perhaps it takes a severe credit crunch for Microsoft to be forced to show the prudence that is routine for any small company. It is probably not entirely coincidental that this news was released the day after Microsoft’s poor quarterly results announcement on January 22.

What happens now?
ProClarity and Business Scorecard Manager will be moved into and bundled with Office SharePoint Server, Enterprise Edition (which also includes Excel Services). This is good news for any maintenance-paying ProClarity or BSM customers, as they will get a free, license-for-license upgrade. The products will be rebranded (again) as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint, and future upgrades will be as part of SharePoint. This should help both SharePoint and ProClarity customers. Of course, this also confirms what was already obvious: all of Microsoft’s BI future reporting and analysis will be Web-based, with no thick client option other than Excel (so no more desktop ProClarity equivalents).

It is less clear what will happen to any customers who have succeeded in deploying PerformancePoint Planning. The number cannot be large, but is probably greater than zero. There are also partners who have invested time and resources in PerformancePoint, whose efforts will turn out to have been wasted. Microsoft, which does not often abandon products in this embarrassing way, will need to do whatever it can to placate them.

Microsoft says that despite stopping development of PerformancePoint Planning it will, “continue supporting our customers’ planning implementations of PerformancePoint Server well into the next decade,” although it is unclear how this is consistent with the statement in the same document that, “we will no longer continue with a standalone version of Office PerformancePoint Server”.

Its reputation has also suffered: in future, customers may be less prepared to soldier on with weak early releases of Microsoft products in the confident expectation that the problems will be fixed by the third release.

[admin]

From CRN Australia:

By Rick Whiting
24 February 2009 07:39AM

Microsoft unveiled a series of data warehouse 'reference architectures' Monday that will allow channel partners to assemble data mart and data warehouse systems using the vendor's SQL Server database and servers from Bull, Dell and Hewlett-Packard..

Microsoft unveiled a series of data warehouse "reference architectures" Monday that will allow channel partners to assemble data mart and data warehouse systems using the vendor's SQL Server database and servers from Bull, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

The SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse initiative is Microsoft's latest push into the market for data warehouse systems that can handle tens, and even hundreds, of terabytes of data. Sometime in the first half of 2010, Microsoft is slated to debut massively parallel data warehouse technology -- being developed under the code name Project Madison -- using technology it acquired in September when it bought data warehouse appliance maker DATAllegro.

The SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse effort will provide customers with preconfigured, pretested data warehouse systems that cost as little as US$13,000 per terabyte of data, said Stuart Frost, who was CEO of DATAllegro and was named general manager of SQL Server data warehousing after the acquisition. Data warehouses built using the reference architectures will scale up to 32TB and process up to 200MBps per central processing unit core, according to Microsoft.

"It's part of the overall move by Microsoft and the SQL Server organization to address the high end of the data warehousing market," Frost said. IBM, Oracle and Teradata sell technology for assembling massive data warehouses that can cost millions, even tens of millions, of dollars. Systems based on the reference architectures will also compete with smaller vendors like Netezza in the market for data warehouse appliances.

By optimizing all hardware components for SQL Server, the reference architecture configurations will reduce the time, effort and cost of deploying data warehouse systems, according to Microsoft. The company is also partnering with systems integrators Avanade, Cognizant Technology Solutions, HP and Hitachi Consulting to provide solution templates tailored for the hardware reference configurations.

Data warehouses built using the reference architectures will run on SMP servers, according to Frost. The "Madison" technology will sit on top of arrays of SQL Server databases, creating a massively parallel computing system that can handle multiple petabytes of data. That development work is progressing on schedule, Frost said.

See original article on CRN.com