BI Tools - Microsoft beating the BI market

Today I finally received an e-mail from Microsoft announcing the release of the CTP version (Community Technology Preview) for SQL 2008 R2 ... and I'm really excited to take the first look and for sure tomorrow I’ll download it ... I'm still focused on my master thesis, any way I will try to "play" a little this release and give a little feedback to you.

I truly believe that today Microsoft made a big step to beat all the competitors. Microsoft doesn’t have several decades of proved work, but has few years that are being improving and investing a lot in the Business Intelligence “world”

But why as an independent BI consultant I believe in Microsoft?

1. Because Is open to the communities/and world in spite of almost other players that they follow a strategy to hide all information and knowledge from their products

2. Because Is a buyer in the market… Examples are the acquisitions of Datallegro, ProClarity, Mobicomp (mobile), Zoomix (data quality), Teradata… and for example partnerships with Dundas, Panorama…

3. Because in a near future BI will be for all users (to the masses) and not only for a few group of decision makers. Today BI is spread in all organization for operational, tactical and strategy areas. Nothing better than improve the capabilities of an existent product in the market that everybody knows what it is, and what it does… simple EXCEL.

4. Because almost the players (SAP, SAS, Microstrategy…) in the BI market provide very expensive tools that are not possible nowadays… Some years ago they could set these expensive costs, because in that time these tools could provide competitive advantage… today even open source solutions are available in BI…

Last decades this BI players was trying to convince the end users and decision makers that they need new applications/interfaces to analyze, monitor and plan their business, but they were wrong, and mainly because Microsoft enter few years ago in this market. The end users and decision makers doesn’t want to know what is behind excel… only wants to see their KPIs no monitor, analyze, plan and control their business in their preferred tool… EXCEL.

In the coming weeks Microsft will also launch CTPs in the Project Gemini (Excel and Sharepoint) and in the Project Madison (massively scalable data warehousing).