The Business Intelligence Blog

This year’s MS BI conference takes place in New Orleans in conjunction with Tech·Ed 2010.

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The co-location allows Microsoft to meet the needs of customers and partners looking to focus specifically on Business Intelligence while also significantly increasing the opportunity to learn about this critical technology for all Tech·Ed attendees.

While these are separate conferences, BI Conference attendees will be exposed to additional networking opportunities with customers and partners as part of Tech·Ed, and will also have access to the Tech·Ed Keynote, Pre-Conference Seminars, more Hands-on Labs, onsite Certification Testing as well as a larger Expo showcasing more Microsoft demo stations, Exhibitors and Sponsors.

More on Microsoft BI. Follow them on Twitter.

Microsoft has made much of the self-service Business Intelligence and integration with Office. In order to make best use of the BI features it is definitely worth upgrading to Office 2010, released to beta last week. A beta version is available for download here. Excel 2010 allows much better slicing and dicing of data, and through the SQL Server PowerPivot add-in for Excel that was known as Gemini, users can investigate data to reveal the information hidden therein.

The Report Builder is also much improved and looks much more like one of the Office 2010 family. It has become much easier to split out various components of a report: If you have a grid, a map and a logo in a report, these can be copied to a Report Part Gallery, effectively a library of elements that can be used time and time again.

A look at SQL Serrver 2008 R2 Preview.

Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.

More from NY Times.

Ventana Research today introduces its 2009 Value Index for Business Intelligence, the second of a new category of quantified, research-based Indexes. This new Value Index provides research-based metrics that will enable organizations to ascertain the value to them of existing and future business intelligence technologies, systems and tools for business and IT in a simple and easy-to-use manner. Using the Value Index, businesses will be able to meet the challenge of evaluating vendors and their products and making choices based on an understanding of how well the offerings meet their needs.

The Value Index is the result of more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers’ products. The methodology used to produce the Value Index for Business Intelligence evaluates in detail aspects of product functionality and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. The Index represents the value offered by a vendor and its products, using both a clear and accessible graphic representation in thermometer form and a precise numerical index. Those technology vendors earning the highest Hot Vendor classification are those that Ventana Research certifies best represent buyer value based on a thorough evaluation and audit – that is, based on research and verifiable facts. The Value Index is not just a selection of “cool” products, and rather than merely representing a vendor on a four-quadrant chart, the Index provides a specific thermometer reading with a series of component metrics for a technology buyer to consider. Organizations can use the Value Index by determining their priorities and then consulting the Index to determine which vendors best meet those needs.

The 2009 Value Index for Business Intelligence indicates that the company delivering the highest value on an overall weighted evaluation basis is Information Builders, which earned the “Hot Vendor” rating, followed by IBM Cognos Software, Infor, Softscape and arcplan, all of which earned the “Warm” rating. Drilling down, the Value Index evaluation of product functionality using the Ventana Research Business Intelligence methodology identified (in order) Information Builders, Infor, IBM Cognos Software, Actuate, Symphony-Metreo, Microsoft and arcplan as Hot Vendors in this category.

From Ventana Research’s Press Release.

Interestingly, despite requiring fewer full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) to support BI deployments, the Best-in-Class are capable of completing BI projects, from start to finish, both on budget and within expected time frames. Additionally, they are delivering BI capabilities to more enterprise users than their counterparts.

This report investigates the key factors that organizations consider important in controlling the total cost of business intelligence implementations. Thirty-seven (37) organizations (20 percent) were found to be Best-in-Class at managing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their business intelligence solutions. Thirty-one percent of the 26 Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) BI users that took part in the survey achieved Best-in-Class status — a higher proportion of its installed base than any other major BI vendor. Figure 1 highlights the number of survey respondents that reported using each vendor’s software, together with the percentage of that vendor’s customers that achieved Best-in-Class.

Interesting article on CRM Buyer

Once again, software is fighting crime. Microsoft unveiled a suite of tools and initiatives for law-enforcement groups “specifically designed to improve public security and safety,” the company said.
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It’s also the latest example of law enforcement officials arming themselves with better technology to help fight crime. The FBI, for instance, said that new database and data-sharing efforts have resulted in solving a number of difficult highway serial killings.

Gathering that data is key. That’s why Microsoft this week said it is giving a free tool to INTERPOL called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), an application that “uses common digital forensics tool to help officers at the scene of the crime.”

The company is working on a mobile version for future release, said Richard Domingues Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft’s Internet security program, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail.

A larger tool set for large-scale crimes is Microsoft Intelligence Framework, which is aimed at helping intelligence and law enforcement agencies coordinate information to detect and prevent terrorism, and to solve organized and major crime cases. The framework offers tools for storing and analyzing evidence and information across a variety of sources

From EarthWeb article.

A fantastic postcard history of Business Intelligence from Microsoft BI.

The “Microsoft SMB Insight Report” reflects the insight of Small Business Specialists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Brazil. The following are some of Microsoft’s key findings on the technologies most likely to drive growth and profitability for SMBs in 2009:

— Fifty percent of the surveyed Small Business Specialists identified virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the technology most likely to reduce operating costs.
— The Small Business Specialists expect a 20 percentage point increase this year in the number of SMBs that use software as a service.
— More than 50 percent of the Small Business Specialists considered customer relationship management (CRM: 34.05, 0, 0%), virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the best investment for maximizing business growth in a down economy.
— Nearly 40 percent expect an increased interest in business intelligence and identified it as a critical tool for helping improve a customer’s experience and increase loyalty.
— More than half of the surveyed Small Business Specialists anticipate an increase in the number of SMB remote workers, and nearly 60 percent expect that the shift to more remote workers also will lead to bigger roles and more responsibilities for those individuals working remotely.

The key here is the increased interest in business intelligence which I think makes total sense given the state of business. From the PRNewswire[Fox]

The challenging economic climate has caused many organizations to take a closer look at their IT strategies in an effort to reduce costs while still maintaining quality. One particular emerging area that is being reevaluated because of its significant licensing, maintenance and specialized support cost is that of business intelligence platforms.

The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, with enhanced business intelligence features, has provided Innovative Architects, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner located in Duluth, GA, with several clients ready to migrate from various competing platforms solely to SQL Server. Innovative Architects has developed proprietary conversion accelerators that provide software automation for converting from other competing point products to the Microsoft BI platform. Innovative Architects’s BI conversion accelerators can reduce the time and cost of replatforming by as much as 50%.

“Our clients rarely use the sophisticated modeling features that they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for and, ultimately, ‘export to Excel’ to actually perform much of their data analysis. When we demonstrate the full capabilities for information insight that the combination of SQL Server 2008 and Excel 2007 can provide, our clients have been amazed,” said Tony Baldwin, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Innovative Architects.

More from PRNewsWire

A blogpost on BI Vendors by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise -

In the “Advanced Analytics” camp, IDC’s stats show that Microsoft, SPSS and SAS were the fastest-growing vendors among the top five with 20.0%, 17.8% and 15.2% sales increases, respectively (see chart at left). Visual Numerics grew 9.3% and Teradata treaded water with 3.0% growth. Mind you, SAS and SPSS are in a league of their own with $440 million and $205 million in revenue, respectively, while all the others were in the Single-A, sub-$50 million ballpark.

SAS has plenty to crow about in IDC’s stats, so it has once again purchased rights to distribute an excerpt of the report as a free download. Unfortunately, this year’s excerpt only covers the top-five vendors in each category (last year’s excerpt covered 21 BI tools vendors and 13 analytics vendors). If you’re prepared to pay $3,500, you can purchase the complete “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2007 Vendor Shares” report, which details sales among the top-15 vendors in BI in 2007 — a list that adds MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, QlikTech, Panorama Software, IBM (without Cognos), and TIBCO to the companies mentioned above.