Written by Rutger van den Berg

Microsoft Announces New Business Intelligence Roadmap

In a recent press release Microsoft announces that PerformancePoint Server (used for planning, scorecarding, dashboarding and analytics) will no longer be available as a standalone product. In the new BI roadmap for BI, Microsoft focuses on Sharepoint, Excel and SQL Server. This is certainly a major albeit not surprising change from Microsoft's roadmap to date. Read more to see the answers that Microsoft gives to some key questions, and to download the full Q&A.

Microsoft say that PerformancePoint will be integrated with Sharepoint to provide customers the benefit of a lower Total Cost of Ownership. Great that Microsoft has the best interest of their customers close at heart, but from what we hear the PerformancePoint product has never been that successful. Implementations are known to be complex and take a long time. In some cases the product was even given away for free.

Sharepoint might be an interesting way to go though, since it certainly provides a platform where a lot interesting parts of the Microsoft product family can be integrated. It also opens up the door to other vendors in the CPM market space (e.g. Tagetik), to integrate their best-of-breed solutions in the Sharepoint environment.

Combining the strong points of best-of-breed CPM software with the power of the Sharepoint environment might lead to very useful solutions. It creates opportunities for decision-makers and employees to have all information that is relevant for their job available in one easy-to-use and reliable environment. Combining BI for the masses with strong processes and systems for corporate performance management may lead to new and surprising results.

To see the full Micrsoft Q&A, download the attachment.