Monday, August 10, 2009

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).

Friday, August 7, 2009

BI Technical Papers Step-By-Step


As you may already noticed, I’ve started this blog (two years ago) with several practice issues, and when I started my BI master degree (also two years ago) I realized that the theory and the concepts are fundamental to have enough capabilities to face all the issues independently of the tools you are using. I’m a practice and theoretical person and just because I think that one depends on the other. It’s difficult? Yes it is, but for me is the single way to understand and align each one.

And for not fill this blog too much, I decided to publish more technical and practice posts at the Business Intelligence community that I’m co-founder with several other BI professionals. These technical posts will be created and published in www.BIResort.net in a format Step-By-Step paper in order to help better not also the more technical persons, but also those persons that are starting to work in this amazing world of Business Intelligence.

I’ll focus in several key areas, but for now I only made three papers in SSIS/ETL area. I’ll start on areas like SSAS/OLAP, SSRS, EXCEL 2010, and others… follow this post through the link in the right bar.
Follow all the papers from this link:
And you can also directly download each paper from here:

SSIS Area

I hope I can help you!

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