The recent announcement of project Kilimanjaro makes abundantly clear Microsoft’s growing aspirations in the Business Intelligence market as it makes Excel the centre piece of its strategy to bring “BI to the masses”. But should major vendors in the BI and performance management space such as IBM, SAP and Oracle be concerned. Gary Simon, suggests that the aptly named Kilimanjaro may unwittingly underline the mountain that Microsoft has to climb.
At its recent business intelligence (BI) conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced details of the next release of SQL Server, codenamed Kilimanjaro. According to Helena Schwenk, an analyst, at Ovum, the timing of the move is interesting. She told FSN, “ All of the attention in the press during the last 18 months has been focused on the big mergers and acquisitions in the Business Intelligence market, this is an attempt to grab back some of the headlines. Announcing these plans so early has the potential to cause ructions in the market.”
Although not available until 2010, Kilimanjaro is an ambitious release for the company for two reasons. Firstly, it represents a more assertive move towards enterprise deployments to put it on a more competitive footing with IBM, Oracle and SAP. But secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, it signifies a greater emphasis towards supporting the needs of end users by leveraging the capabilities of SQL Server and the ubiquity of Excel. These are unchartered waters for Microsoft; while Excel is a pervasive BI tool, it has certain technical limitations that prevent it from being used as a full-blown reporting and analysis tool - the next version of SQL Server addresses this.
The idea of using Excel as the front end analysis and reporting tool for business intelligence applications is far from new but the enhanced capabilities being promised are significant.
“The primary difference in this announcement is the ability for in memory processing capabilities that usually return superior computational performance,” Schwenk told FSN, but concedes that other players such as Applix TM1, recently acquired by Cognos and then subsumed into IBM (when ‘big blue’ acquired Cognos) have been offering in memory processing for some time.
“The key point is that that this capability is all native to Microsoft Excel and does not require third party integration. This capability is aimed at the high end accounting or power user who does not have to step outside of the Microsoft technology stack. What Microsoft is doing is making Excel front and centre of its BI strategy because they realise that this gives them an immense competitive edge”, she added.
Excel is indeed central to Business Intelligence and many performance management applications. Despite a concerted effort over the years by the Business Intelligence industry to de-emphasise Excel and magnify the limitations of spreadsheets the worksheet has stubbornly remained the workhorse of the finance function.
It is this positioning and Microsoft’s keen pricing policy, supported by an ability to attractively bundle different elements of its technology stack that Ovum sees as a potential threat to the other established BI vendors.
Understanding the components of Kilimanjaro is a challenge in itself. “Despite market confusion, Kilimanjaro does not equate to the next version of SQL Server but does in fact relate to a number of features and functionality included in the next release of SQL Server 2008 that will make the platform more scalable and help it appeal to a wider pool of business users.
“There are three different project names to get your head around”, says Schwenk. “Firstly, the company has introduced self-service reporting capabilities within the next release of Microsoft SQL Server – codenamed Kilimanjaro. Secondly, it has announced new managed self-service analysis capabilities – codenamed Project Gemini. And finally, the company aims to deliver advanced data warehousing functionality within SQL Server under the project codenamed Madison”.
Project Gemini – is believed by many to be the standout announcement. It in turn has three main elements: an update to the Analysis Services engine; an Excel add-in client component for in-memory, on-the-fly sorting, filtering and slicing & dicing of large data sets; and deeper integration with Sharepoint.
“Project Gemini is clearly targeted at the power users that require the familiarity of Excel but with the scale and power of a heavy-duty multidimensional tool – SQL Server Analysis Services.,” says Schwenk.
The Excel add-in component has been designed to overcome some of the technical limits to crunching data within Excel, and allows users to download millions of rows of data from disparate sources and present and compare data within its interface. The add-in component also alleviates the need for users to understand and become proficient with the design, build and population of a multidimensional structure. It can, for instance, automatically infer relationships between data sets brought into the spreadsheet and join them using Analysis Services behind the scenes. Furthermore users can model, build and test their own BI applications without impacting on live BI systems. If users then want to share or ‘productionise’ the multidimensional model, Gemini integrates with SharePoint for sharing, collaboration and management of the application.
However Alys Woodward, analyst at IDC, told FSN, "This provides pitfalls as well as opportunities for financial users. Although these Excel enhancements will help users to build models that may be simpler and easier to understand, when users build their own powerful Excel models the challenge is to make sure these models are built on a clean and consistent data source, so users know what they are looking at is a "single version of the truth". My concern is that "Excel on steroids" could lead, in some organisations, to "spreadmarts on steroids" – separate data marts that users have a high level of investment in, but because the links to source data are not clear, no-one knows where this information has come from, and it is not broadly trusted in the organisation – in effect everyone is working from their own dataset. This is setting BI back by ten years, and may be a good thing for companies selling software but is not good for end-user organisations, particularly not for regulatory compliance, and not for the use of BI as a whole."
IDC’s Woodward also cautions on cost. "Microsoft has successfully built the perception that its software is cheap, but when looking at costs you must always consider all the different products you will actually need. In this case, note that you will need to have SharePoint deployed in order to share these models. "
“Excel isn't the only client application Microsoft plans to leverage; users will be also able to access BI data from Microsoft’s Dynamics 2009”, Schwenk told FSN. “Project Madison, on the other hand, is designed to support high-end, large-scale data warehousing deployments through the integration of technology assets it acquired from Datallegro in September,” she added.
Whether Kilimanjaro/Gemini is a threat to existing BI players will also come down to domain knowledge around the applications that business users need rather than yet more technology. “Microsoft has always relied on its channel partners to add value to the technology and build applications – this is no different,” she counters. But this still leaves Microsoft potentially exposed where businesses such as Business Objects (SAP) and Oracle (the old Hyperion bit) have the capability in-house.
Where Microsoft may also be challenged is in its ability to deliver on time. According to Schwenk, Microsoft must buck the trend for late releases. “Unlike some of its cautious competitors, Microsoft has openly shared details of the SQL Server roadmap it aims to deliver over the next two years. This is a brave and bold move by the company, as Microsoft isn’t always known for its reliability on release dates (SQL Server 2008 was six months late and SQL Server 2005 was even later). Let’s hope Microsoft manages to buck this trend with Kilimanjaro,” she adds.
