Microsoft last week launched its second annual Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Conference 2008 by announcing new technologies that they say will put the power of Business Intelligence in the hands of end users as well as dealing with some of the largest data warehouses “terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent users”. The company introduced new managed self-service analysis capabilities and self-service reporting in the next release of Microsoft SQL Server— code-named “Kilimanjaro.”
Microsoft’s BI solution spans Microsoft Office Excel and other Office applications for individual BI, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for team BI and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server for organisation-wide BI, with SQL Server as the data platform.
“Microsoft’s goal is to transform the way companies think of BI through familiar and intuitive business-friendly tools that help them unlock the power of BI across their organizations,” Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division told the more than 2,500 conference attendees. “If you know how to use Word and Excel, then you’ll be able to use our BI — that’s our commitment to customers.”
Unveiling Kilimanjaro, Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Data and Platform Storage Division, said that it will include a set of new, easy-to-use analysis tools for managed self-service, that will enable information workers to ‘slice and dice’ data and create their own BI applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.
Microsoft says that customers and partners will be able to gain early access to “Kilimanjaro” within the next 12 months with full product availability planned for the first half of calendar year 2010.
“To capitalize on the real value and potential of BI, organizations are turning more traditional approaches upside down — providing BI and performance management capabilities to a broader set of knowledge workers and managers,” said Bill Hostmann, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Users want to analyze data and use that information to derive new insights that improve their business processes.”
Microsoft is also promising massively increased scalability capable of supporting the very largest data warehousing deployments. The solution, which will integrate technology from recently acquired data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro Inc., will be able to handle the most demanding data warehousing workloads spanning hundreds of terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent users at the low total cost of ownership (TCO) businesses have come to expect from SQL Server.
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