Business Intelligence (BI) is definitely moving away from a position of being dominated by pure-play vendors. Large acquisitions in 2007, when SAP bought Business Objects and IBM aquired Congnos, show how quickly BI is moving from a specialized, expensive technology into a commodity itself. Microsoft has realized the potential of this growing market when it released the first version of SharePointPortal Server in 2001. The market reaction was excellent. According to Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft has sold over 85 million licenses in the first six years of SharePoint life, making it one of the fastest-growing server products in Microsoft’s history.
A full range of BI products was completed when Microsoft announced a release of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (PPS). It is actually a bundle of three different packages: Business Scorecard Manager for monitoring, Proclarity for analysis, and a third and completely separate module for planning.
Being brand new software, it still needs a lot of improvements and a closer integration of three mentioned modules. However, the market has reacted very positively to PPS, and it is not a surprise that a 2008 Gartner report has evaluated Microsoft BI solutions in Leaders part of its “magic quadrant” for Business Intelligence Platforms. It joins companies such as: Cognos, Business Objects, Oracle, SAS Institure and Microstrategy, and it outperforms competitors like: SAP, Information Builders, Actuate etc. Gartner researches have rated Microsoft BI platform to have the best ability to execute, including the competitiveness and success of its BI goods and services, its viability and investment in BI, and the execution of its sales and pricing. SAS Institute has been rated to have the best completeness of vision, but it falls significantly bellow Microsoft in the ability to execute criteria.
Gartner analysts wrote: "The bundling and pricing of its BI products makes [Microsoft] an economically attractive offering that will be considered by many organizations". They added that Microsoft's large development community will lead to fast platform improvements.
With the explosion of data collected in various production systems, and with increasing trends of standardization and unification of transactional processing system, the world of BI solutions looks very prosperous, and Microsoft is moving in right direction.
