Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2008 Seattle - First impressions day one

Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 7 of October , 2008 at 2:46 am

At home I always tell my children that everything is Business Intelligence. Last week my daughter gave me her favorite bear and told me it could already say: “Everything is” and after spending one day with ‘grandfather’ she was sure that the bear could learn to say BI as well. Today at the Seattle BI Conference I found out that I was right. Everything is about BI. Or as they say at Microsoft this year: Think Bigger About BI. They explained to us that BI is going to be part of everything, meaning: (1) Embedding information everywhere, (2) Include unstructured data and (3) Actionable BI is part of our daily work. Even playing Halo 3 on the Xbox is considered to be BI because of all the real time statistics. The overall theme this year would definitely be PERVASIVE. I started out with the BS bingo during the Keynote and Pervasive won hands down. MSoft is serious in their business focus. They expect BI can improve the productivity of information workers. They call it the democratization of BI by putting it in the hands of everyone. Following the recent evolution of the BI industry the market has changed from many pure players into a consolidated few large vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle & SAP) with many different solutions. Does that mean that everything has changed? From where I am looking this just means that the brand name changes but the solutions (for now) remain the same. MSoft boasts an Integrated end-to-end solution that other parties miss and as an extra Unique Selling Point the all too familiar technology of Excel. As I explained before I question this last argument. Many clients perceive Microsoft Excel as the head of the beast (not necessarily the beast). Therefore they go to great lengths to avoid Excel as they fear this will be considered as old style spreadsheet BI. But to be honest Msoft has made some major steps with MOSS 2007, PPS 2008 and SQL Server 2008. They have made it easy to have an integrated (portal or thin client) environment to communicate, analyze, research both structured as well as unstructured data. With their constant focus on end user (Joe Report) or customer focus they understand that technology is just the enabler here. They have built a platform with enterprise data (low cost of tco), beyond rational (including other types of data), dynamic development (richer solutions) and pervasive (BS Bingo!) insight enabling business users to get answers fast. But at the other hand I hear a lot of million rows of this, terabytes, services etcetera. I guess it is difficult to shake of the technical stuff. Especially in a room where people actually  applaud for 20 million rows in Excel! Two exciting projects were announced today. The first one is a project codenamed Madison. It will release in the first half of 2010 and concerns the integration of the recently acquired Datallegro. Using Massive Parallel Processing capabilities on top of reference hardware platform they will be able to scale SQL server to hundreds of TB and still get great performance. Something to look forward to as the amount of data seems to increase more and more over time. The other important announcement was on Project GEMINI. Part of the SQL server Kilimanjaro release also in H1 2010 it empowers end users to work with self service analysis, self service reporting and sharing and collaboration management. Basically it allows end users access to a component based library where the data warehouse data can be joined in Excell with all kinds of external data using what looks like a pivot table. Underlying is a star schema which allows for slicing and dicing. By creating your own reports, integrating it seamless without effort with other external data and publishing it on a portal environment (with collaboration features) actually sounds like something I look forward to seeing in action.  I would say that they had a pretty good start of the conference and I look forward to seeing and hearing more of their long term vision on putting the user behind the wheel.

Category: BI Thoughts

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