Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, Wants to Democratize BI

By Kalman Toth, Business Intelligence Architect

May 11, 2007

Ballmer, at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007, came up with his own version of “BI for the masses”(Business Intelligence for the masses): democratization of BI (democratization of Business Intelligence), meaning that BI is for everybody not only for the CEO-s of large companies. He was predicting "the information workers who today feel bombarded with information [in the future] will feel effortlessly connected and in control of the information they need  finding it, using it and collaborating around it. Business Intelligence is squarely in the middle of that challenge."

He stated that Business intelligence is a "key area" for Microsoft and for the future of IT. While Microsoft's CEO only discussed cooperating and competing with SAP, the message was clear and loud to ORACLE and IBM, the giants of BI market place, too, that Microsoft is serious about BI. Just to underscore the new BI push, HP and Dell were on hand with exhibits of huge servers.

"We recognize HP as a key global partner who our customers can depend on," said Tom Casey, general manager, SQL Server Business Intelligence, Microsoft Corp. "Together, Microsoft and HP are providing customers high-quality products and an unprecedented opportunity to deliver pervasive business insight throughout an organization. Getting the right information, in the right format, at the right time is key to building a People-Ready Business, leveraging an organization's greatest asset - its people."

"HP Integrity servers running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 are exceeding our business intelligence needs. We are now reaping the benefits of a 70 to over 100 percent performance improvement that enables us to make better business decisions faster and also gives us the headroom to sustain our 8 percent annual growth rate," said Ron Van Zanten, managing officer, Business Intelligence, PREMIER Bankcard. "Not only did HP offer an exceptional systems and support solution with the business intelligence applications we needed, but also HP's responsive, knowledgeable staff helped get us up and running quickly. It is clear that HP really cares about our success."

Ben Barnes, vice president and general manager, Business Intelligence, HP, said: "For organizations migrating from earlier applications or looking to leverage business intelligence benefits for the first time, the HP reference configurations for Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies can quickly and efficiently put them on the road to building a next-generation data warehouse. These configurations and architectures will help save customers money, mitigate deployment time and risk, and enable them to start realizing business outcomes faster."


"Microsoft is charting a course to transform the BI marketplace as we know it," Raikes, Business Division President, said. "By fundamentally changing the economic model for BI and delivering unprecedented ease of use, we're enabling the broadest deployment of BI possible so employees can better contribute to a company's overall business performance."

Good news for BI consumers: Microsoft said it sees sales for the entire business intelligence marketing shrinking even as more people use the software, because its products will be so discounted compared to existing and competitive offerings.

Large management consulting companies were present also to underscore Microsoft’s BI reach into the profitable Fortune 500 market segment.

"Companies intent on leading their industry are striving to understand their business performance, at all levels, on execution of strategy and 'big bets' much more intensely than in years past. The return on Business Intelligence investments is strong and predictable, but in many cases these programs return additional decision-making benefits companies do not anticipate," said Todd Price, managing vice president  of the Hitachi Consulting National Business Intelligence and Performance Management team.

"Case study after case study demonstrate the power and effectiveness of BI and Performance Management activity. This is a growing business discipline where having an executive-sponsored multi-year roadmap and an enterprise approach is more important than ever," Mr. Price concluded.

Jeff Raikes,  President of Microsoft Business Division  said Microsoft business intelligence products would cost much less than competing software, meaning companies could afford to let more people get access to the software.

"The cost of our solutions will be a quarter of the traditional solutions," said Raikes. "The economics are going to get transformed."

Reflecting the "BI for everyone" theme underpinning Microsoft's BI strategy, Ballmer said, "If businesses want a higher level of performance, then they have to enable their people to make better decisions. That's something we at Microsoft are very excited about."

On the futuristic stage Ballmer also interviewed customers Randy Benz, CIO of Energizer, and Steve Anderson, Chief Architect at the Veteran's Health Administration, about their use of the Microsoft BI platform. Energizer (battery manufacturer) is developing scorecard apps on the beta version of PerformancePoint while the Veterans Administration is centralizing multiple departmental deployments of Microsoft BI and ProClarity software. The soon to be released PerformancePoint is based in large part on performance management software from ProClarity, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, moved into server environment.  When asked about why the champion of personal computing, Microsoft, going the way of centralization with servers, Ballmer was hesitant with his answer without making commitment one way or the other. About Office: "It's clear that Office needs to make transition to software plus service," Ballmer replied to the question, "but I wouldn't go as far as some pundits who suggest that means we need to do a complete rewrite in Ajax."

Questioned about the SAP relationship: "I think we're doing a superb job of offering you a choice. You can follow a Microsoft strategy, an SAP strategy or you can choose Duet, our joint solution. We'll continue to invest in Duet and we'll work to make core programs more interoperable."  Ballmer also said that head-on competition with SAP maybe in the cards.

Ballmer realizes that the process of “democratizing BI” will take many years of hard work:  "until every knowledge worker who has a question can say, 'I could find the information I needed and answer that question myself,' we'll still have work to do."