Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 28 of January , 2009 at 10:50 am
Two important announcements came from Microsoft recently. One was that Microsoft is firing people. A move that was inevitable after analysts said that Microsoft had to lay off at least 10% op their workforce to remain healthy. Another one was an update of their BI product roadmap. Performance Point Server scorecard, dashboard, and analytical capabilities will be consolidated into Sharepoint Server Enterprise. This means that they will not continue with their Performance Point Planning solution. In their words: after PPS Service Pack 3 (expected mid calendar year 2009) no further investments will be made in planning and stand alone versions of PPS. Are these two facts related? Maybe not but it helps them on their way to this tough 10% target. Is this update of their BI products roadmap unexpected? In my opinion it is not. There are several reasons for this. PPS Planning has never been very successful and I have seen a limited number of implementations. When competing with other planning products (Hyperion(Oracle), Outlooksoft(SAP) or Cognos Plannings(IBM)) they often lost the battle. One could also argue that they are their own biggest competitor with MS Excel as the number 1 planning tool in the world or BI tool for that matter. Also this product does not fit their BI for the masses strategy. Planning has always been the domain of a limited number of (financial) people. But this is not only a defensive move. Integrating PPS with Sharepoint also allows for a ‘marriage’ between structured and unstructured data which is promoted by many BI experts of late. It will be interesting to see if other BI vendors are going to reposition their planning capabilities.
Category: BI Tools, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Microsoft
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