Microsoft’s New Mission: BI for Everyone

By Kalman Toth, Business Intelligence Architect

May 12, 2007

At this week's Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle, a survey by CapGemini, one of the world's leaders in Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing services, found that six in ten respondents (60%) believe business intelligence (BI) will be their top IT priority over the next 3 years, compared to less than one in three (32%) who are betting on service-oriented architecture(SOA).

"This survey confirms that Business Intelligence is a mission critical priority for organizations; using timely data could mean finding the next big marketplace, while using data late could chart an organization on a path to obsolescence," said Ron Tolido, Chief Technology Officer,  Northern Europe and Asia Pacific at CapGemini "We have launched a global Intelligent Enterprise initiative with Microsoft to train 2,000 people with advanced Microsoft BI skills by the end of the year and ultimately help organizations use this abundance of information to make the choices that differentiate leaders and laggards."

"We can clearly see that Microsoft is betting heavily on BI much more so than in the past," continued Ron Tolido. "The BI suite has reached a maturity level, and the clear strategy of spreading BI to everyone has really made a difference to us and to our customers."

“Redefining Pervasive Insight” is Microsoft’s new approach. Somewhat controversial though, since leading BI experts feel there is no “insight” without BI, so better expression would be “Architecting Pervasive Insight through BI”.

SQL Server "Katmai" provides a more scalable infrastructure that enables IT to drive business intelligence throughout the organization.  The emphasis is scalability from huge to tiny.  Huge for large enterprises, tiny for individual staff.

Katmai brings powerful BI capabilities and valuable data even closer to every user from CEO to mail clerk.

Katmai empowers users to easily consume information due to increased integration with Microsoft Office 2007, Excel 2007, Proclarity and other Microsoft as well as third party products from vendors like BO, Cognos and Microstrategy.

Katmai provides reports (through Reporting Services) of any size or complexity internally within organizations and externally to partners and suppliers (Microsoft executives stressed this point.).

Katmai integrates all relevant data (through Analysis and Integration Services) into a scalable and comprehensive data warehouse platform.