Assessment

Microsoft's business intelligence strategy continues to look like it merely comprises a series of initiatives among Microsoft business units - in particular Office, SQL Server and Microsoft Business Solutions. It's now possible to work with Microsoft Analysis Services cubes and create scorecards in a number of Microsoft tools and applications. The question for end-users and Microsoft's partners is which of these offerings to invest time and effort into or whether to simply ignore Microsoft BI for the moment and stick with BI vendors who at least are more focused on delivering a coherent BI offering.

Naturally, these new BI offerings complement and depend on specific components of the Microsoft technology stack and allow businesses heavily invested in Office technologies and skills to gain further ROI from their efforts. But there remains a question about whether the desktop productivity focus of the Office platform and group is appropriate for the development and support of business management applications like BI. Ventana Research believes that this BI approach is interesting because it points to an increasing awareness in Microsoft of the need to leverage the BI platform within Microsoft SQL Server. But these offerings are just a first step and while they deliver BI capabilities onto the desktop , they will not substantially impact an organizations enterprise-wide BI strategy.

Market Impact

The ability to analyze Microsoft Analysis Services cubes in Microsoft Excel and create scorecards in portals has been around in the marketplace for some years now. From a functional perspective, there is nothing new here, Microsoft is playing catch-up. But Microsoft Office is rapidly becoming a BI Trojan-horse as more BI capability is baked-in and more desktops begin to use it simply because it's there. So as these products are improved, they could eventually have an impact on the market simply because of the penetration of Office on corporate desktops. Until then, mid-market and enterprise providers like Business Objects, Cognos, Corporate Radar, DataBeacon and Hyperion will continue to offer much more complete and mature performance management offerings.

Recommendation

Ventana Research recommends that SMB/SME organizations already leveraging Excel and SharePoint and with limited IT resources and minimal BI budget should assess these offerings against other mid-market BI offerings. Larger organizations should evaluate these Microsoft offerings against more mature products that already exist in this space and adopt a "watch and wait" approach to any widespread adoption. The Office BI add-ins could be the means to pilot low-cost, low-commitment BI initiatives to explore ways to make more use of transactional data stored in SQL Server databases or to round out existing SharePoint portal investments. Companies should approach enterprise rollouts to more than workgroups of a few dozen users with caution as the scalability of these offerings have not been proven in larger deployments.