Intelligent Enterprise

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday unveiled PerformancePoint Server 2007, which would eventually become the focal point for all of the company's business intelligence tools.

Scheduled for release in beta in November, PerformancePoint Server is expected to leverage analysis and reporting capabilities in SQL Server 2005 database and present information to a company's knowledge workers through Office 2007.

In particular, PerformancePoint would present data and allow it to be manipulated in Excel, which should reduce the learning curve since most workers are familiar with the spreadsheet application. For IT, PerformancePoint would include business-modeling capabilities to develop performance metrics that would be consistent across an organization.

While corporate analysts and executives have used business intelligence tools for years, the software's interface has proven too unfriendly to be useful to most company employees, experts say. As a result, valuable information is left out of the working day of sales staff, customer service representatives and other workers.

Indeed, only 20 percent to 30 percent of potential BI users in a company currently use the tools, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division, said in a teleconference on Tuesday. As a result, Microsoft sees a profitable market in making BI more accessible.

"Customers really want a complete product line that can support their scale and the information workers across the organization," Raikes said.

Dan Everett, analyst for Ventana Research, said Microsoft's strategy, along with its current technology, could take it ahead of other vendors in extending business intelligence into a wider variety of business processes. As part of its BI plans, Microsoft plans to integrate its Dynamics product line, which includes business management software for automating financial, customer relationship and supply-chain processes.

"Other companies have been talking about this, but if you really look at what they're offering, it's more financial focused," Everett said. "Microsoft definitely has the technology it needs (to go further)." Microsoft also plans to boost capabilities of its software to provide knowledge workers with information that would be useful in spotting current trends or problems, and to take action. This is a common strategy among business intelligence vendors, including Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, as well as large vendors providing BI tools, such as Oracle. BI traditionally has focused more on reporting of past events.

Nevertheless, providing a user interface that takes full advantage of BI capabilities remains a work in progress. Analysts say vendors will also need to eventually provide collaboration tools, such as instant messaging, chat room and document sharing, in order for information workers to easily act together on a troubling trend.

In that area, Microsoft plans to integrate its portal and collaboration software SharePoint 2007 with PerformancePoint. IBM, on the other hand, is offering Lotus Notes and Workplace to provide similar functions on top of SAP BI tools that work off information in the German software maker's business applications.

SAP is also working with Microsoft in using Office as a front end for SAP business intelligence. The joint project, called Duet, is expected to be released this month, but its initial capabilities will be limited to four common self-service process scenarios: time management, leave management, organization management and budget monitoring.

Having Office gives Microsoft an advantage in the BI market, because most information workers today use Excel spreadsheets to perform many analytical tasks.

"Clearly, Microsoft has the advantage of being able to leverage Office as the delivery mechanism," Everett said.

Microsoft is recommending that customers interested in its BI tools should start with the two products the company offers separately today: Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and the ProClarity Analytics Server, which is the result of the recent acquisition of BI software vendor ProClarity.

In November, Microsoft plans to release PerformancePoint in beta, with the final version set to ship in mid-2007 containing the capabilities of the separate BI software, along with Office 2007 integration.