Microsoft Events

[Steve Bennett]

Notices, observations and comments about Microsoft events.

[Steve Bennett]

Microsoft Australia is holding two BI one day summits:

Business Intelligence: empowering users at all levels
The Business Intelligence Summit delves into the technology and practical benefits behind Microsoft’s leading business intelligence products, and how to seamlessly integrate them within your organisation. It’s the first of its kind to be held in Australia.

• Explore a comprehensive BI solution. Featuring the recently launched PerformancePoint Server 2007 and other leading products, customer best practices sessions, hands-on labs, and networking opportunities.
• Learn about capabilities and solution expertise from keynote speakers
  Hear from Chris Caren, General Manager, Business Intelligence, and Bruno Aziza, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server.
  Hear about end-to-end case studies directly from our customers:
  The Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne,
  Queensland Rail, Mediterranean Shipping Company and BrightStar corporation.
• Attend a range of relevant in-depth sessions
  Have your burning questions answered at a choice of sessions specific to Microsoft BI Platform and Infrastructure, BI Clients and Applications, Customer Best Practices and Partner Training.

Melbourne:
28 November 2007
Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank

Sydney:
29 November 2007
Star City, Pyrmont

It sounds worthwhile, so I am going to the Sydney event.

[Steve Bennett]

This is a very active group with regular events throughout the year. Check out their website for discussions and event details.

If you are into SQL Server, then this is a must visit site.

[Steve Bennett]

They're not yet coming to Australia but Kimball now has a series of courses entitled Microsoft Data Warehouse in Depth. Taught by Joy Mundy & Warren Thornthwaite.

Times are:

• September 16-19, 2008
  Minneapolis, MN
  Minneapolis Depot Renaissance
• October 20-23, 2008
  London, UK
  Crowne Plaza London Heathrow
• December 2-5, 2008
  Dallas, TX
  Westin City Center, Dallas

Course details are online here.

[Doug Heywood]

Microsoft to boost SQL scale after DATAllegro buy

Microsoft laid out a timeline for when it will release new products integrating technology from its acquisition of DATAllegro.

Nancy Gohring (IDG News Service) 17/09/2008 08:07:00

Within the next 12 months, Microsoft will start extending SQL Server to support very large volumes of data, based on technology it acquired from DATAllegro.

Microsoft announced plans to acquire the developer of large-volume data warehouse appliances in July and said on Tuesday that the deal has closed.

It plans to begin by offering community technology previews within the next 12 months of a product that integrates DATAllegro technology so that SQL Server users can support hundreds of terabytes of data, Microsoft said. The final product should become commercially available in the first half of 2010, the company said.

At the time of the acquisition announcement, Microsoft said that DATAllegro's technology will allow it to compete with the highest-end enterprise data warehousing solutions, surpassing Oracle's capabilities.

Microsoft may reveal more details about its plans for DATAllegro's technology at its business intelligence conference in Seattle in early October. Customers are likely interested to find out more about how Microsoft plans to integrate the technologies, given that DATAllegro's appliance is based on the open-source Ingres database.

That could also be an issue for Microsoft if it hopes to retain DATAllegro's existing customer base, which might have to migrate to SQL Server in favor of Ingres in order to continue using technology from DATAllegro in the future. Microsoft says it plans to support existing DATAllegro customers.

As previously announced, Microsoft will retain most of DATAllegro's staff and will maintain its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, California. The companies have not revealed terms of the deal.

The acquisition reflects market demand for better and more cost-effective products for managing and mining very large volumes of data. Microsoft has also recently acquired Zoomix, a developer of data quality technology.

[Jo Vincent]

Microsoft looks to unlock door to wider BI use
Strategy will scale up size of data warehouses SQL Server can support and introduce an Excel-based user analytics mashup tool.

Eric Lai 14/10/2008 Computerworld

SQL Server may be one of the most popular databases among corporate users, but Microsoft is a relative laggard in the business intelligence market. It ranked just fifth among BI vendors last year, according to market research firm IDC.

But Microsoft last week detailed a multipronged strategy aimed at scaling up the size of the data warehouses that SQL Server can support into the hundreds of terabytes while also, in the vendor's words, democratizing BI within companies through the use of Excel and other Office applications.

In particular, Excel may turn out to be Microsoft's BI ace in the hole.

The ubiquitous spreadsheet is already the most popular front-end program among business analysts and other workers looking to display and analyze the results of BI queries, said James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Now, via a self-service analysis project code-named Gemini, Microsoft plans to develop "an Excel-based user analytics mashup tool" designed to make it easier for end users to build their own BI applications , Kobielus said in an e-mail. He called Gemini a "game-changer" for the BI market.

Some IT managers whose companies use SQL Server were also impressed by what they heard about Gemini, which Microsoft plans to ship as part of a BI-oriented release of SQL Server 2008 that is code-named Kilimanjaro.

Lacking Resources

David Smith, CIO at ServiceU Corp., an event management and ticketing services provider in Memphis, said his IT staff has "a limited number of man-hours" that it can devote to BI projects for end users. And he doesn't think ServiceU is alone in that regard.

"Microsoft has correctly determined that the limiting factor for most businesses to implement significant BI projects is the scarcity of IT resources," Smith said. In some cases, that means workers are shut out from using BI tools, he added. But to Smith, Gemini appears to offer a way of making analytic capabilities available on a much broader scale.

Mayur Raichura, vice president of information services at Long & Foster Real Estate, also thinks that Microsoft's plan will enable more users to analyze data without IT's help.

And Excel's ability to handle millions of rows of data in memory should make it possible for Long & Foster to examine large amounts of data from the company's transaction systems and its Web site search logs, according to Raichura. If so, that will "position us to deliver a better financial analysis in a real-time mode," he said.


At its second annual BI conference, held in Seattle, Microsoft said that a Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of Kilimanjaro and Gemini will become available within a year. Commercial shipments are scheduled to follow in the first half of 2010.

Kilimanjaro is also being designed to support large data warehouses and BI deployments. To help with that, Microsoft detailed another project, code-named Madison, under which it will integrate SQL Server 2008 with technology developed by Datallegro, a data warehousing appliance vendor that Microsoft acquired last month.

Microsoft has plenty of catching up to do with other vendors at the high end of the BI market, Kobielus said. SQL Server typically scales only "into the dozens of terabytes" now, he noted.

The Madison technology will be able to handle workloads involving hundreds of terabytes of data and thousands of users, Microsoft said. The company demonstrated a 150TB database running 24 instances of SQL Server 2008 at the conference. A CTP version is due within 12 months. And Microsoft said it's working with server and storage vendors, including Dell, EMC and Hewlett-Packard, to give users "an appliance-like buying experience."

But even with the addition of Datallegro, Microsoft is well behind rivals such as Teradata Corp. in high-end market share. Curt Monash, an independent database analyst, said that although Datallegro's technology was strong, the appliance vendor had few customers before Microsoft bought it.

Heather Havenstein contributed to this story.

[admin]

From idg.net.au:

By Mike Davis and Madan Sheina, analysts at Ovum

February 12, 2009: At its FASTforward’09 conference in Las Vegas this week Microsoft’s newly acquired FAST subsidiary laid out a two-pronged development strategy for its enterprise search assets – one aimed at Internet businesses and the other at business productivity search.

The roadmap attempts to combine the strengths of Microsoft and FAST technologies with a strategy that ensures that customers from either side are not left out in the cold. The most interesting move is pairing the sophistication of FAST’s enterprise search platform (ESP) to the simplicity and attractive price point of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).


The goal, of course, is true to Microsoft type – to bring high-end search to the mainstream. Microsoft is looking to push ESP’s high-end capabilities onto knowledge worker desktops and to power e-business websites

This isn’t so much a new product development roadmap as it is a pairing of the sophistication of FAST’s high-end ESP and the simplicity and compelling price-points of select Microsoft server platforms. There are “new” server-based offerings that integrate ESP with MOSS 2007 and e-business environments for better search-driven performance. FAST insists that it isn’t deploying a lightweight version of ESP into these environments. These are full-blown versions of the product that will provide deeper and more complex search queries than ever before.

However, customers will have to be patient to get their hands on these new ESP-enabled offerings. The beta and release for FAST Search for MOSS will be synchronised to Office 14. For itchy and qualified MOSS customers that can’t wait, there is an early promotional offer to access select ESP capabilities with a licensing migration path to the fully integrated FAST Search for MOSS product.

Meanwhile FAST Search for Internet Business, which tunes ESP for online business scenarios through a range of front- and back-end enhancements around content integration, analytics and interaction management, is expected to come out of beta in the second half of 2009. Pricing will be based on factors like the number of items to be searched and the volume of search capacity required.

SharePoint gives FAST ESP a broader opportunity to shine. The most interesting part of this roadmap is the integration of high-end search into MOSS. Billed rather generically as infrastructure for enabling so-called “business productivity”, MOSS has over the years become a magnet for a number of tools and functionality. Microsoft seems content to throw everything at it – collaboration, content management, portal, scorecarding and dashboarding, and search. However, many of these capabilities have been dismissed as being too lightweight. The search capability in particular hit a low ceiling in terms of the documents it could handle and customers were forced to license third-party search capabilities.

Microsoft makes no bones about its proletarian vision of democratising IT access. First it was “business intelligence for the masses”. Now Microsoft seems intent on bringing the power of high-end search to everyone. The difference is that ESP was an expensive high-end platform. To enable broad deployment and usage of ESP at an affordable cost to all pockets, Microsoft is tying it to MOSS’s user-based Client Access Licensing (CAL) scheme – i.e. customers that already have MOSS will only have to fork out for server licences that search will be deployed on – to enable broad deployment and usage.

Of course, MOSS customers that already hold an Enterprise CAL will be laughing, since they will effectively own the product when it becomes available as part of Office 14. These customers won’t have to buy additional client licences for ESP. All they have to do is purchase the additional server licences for the new product. Microsoft cleverly spins this as giving “credit” to a customer for their MOSS investment.

Microsoft’s creative licensing might have the potential to change the price performance ratio of enterprise search – by as much as 50% assuming buyers are already MOSS customers. It will be interesting to see how rivals like Autonomy react – perhaps by offering a discounted version of its IDOL engine with its recently acquired Interwoven content management platform.

However, the old adage “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink” holds true. It’s unclear how many MOSS customers will flip the ESP switch that will be made readily available to them? If a lot of them do then Microsoft has just claim to transforming enterprise search from a cottage industry into the business mainstream.