Business Intelligence - more than just OLAP

Many companies have developed a suite of reporting systems, executive dashboards, and scorecards. Structured analytics is based on a structured or official way of looking at a business and its operations. The structure is based upon the semantic consistency and hierarchical taxonomy of conformed dimensions and is often implemented in an OLAP environment for use in drill-down, roll-up and other point-and-click data navigation.

The strength of structured analytics is the consistent application of key performance indicators (KPIs) and important metrics to the business for understanding important results, both current and as trends over time, of the business and their underlying factors. Structured analytics are well-suited for executives and operational managers who manage business operations and need to act quickly to resolve problems and turn information into action.

Structured analytics are not well suited for thinking outside the square. There are two main types of unstructured analytics: statistical analysis and data discovery. Many companies experience blind spots because they are completely reliant upon the structure analytics. Instead they should use unstructured analytics to identify new insights into their business.

Statistical Analysis

Many companies have gone beyond structured analytics and utilize statistical analysis, often called data mining, for actuarial analysis of insurance and financial products, behavioral analysis of customers, quality analysis of suppliers and many other uses. Statistical analysis applies mathematical models to find statistical correlations between elements of business data. The purpose is to develop a model that predicts an outcome with a measurable degree of certainty so the model may be applied to help create more of a desirable outcome or less of an undesirable one.

The strength of statistical analysis is in its ability to use the power of mathematics to create models that can help increase revenues by optimizing business actions. Potential applications are cross-selling and up-selling products, identifying high-value customers, maximizing supplier quality and so forth. There is one problem, however: statistical analysis requires users to have some background in mathematics or statistics. While statistical analysis tools implement algorithms that don’t require this background, it helps to have an understanding of linear programming, distribution analysis, time-series analysis and other concepts to ensure that the model developed is accurate for the business situation being analyzed.

The use of statistical analysis in business is limited to specialized areas because of this skills requirement. Also, the development of a model takes time: data needs to be gathered, correlations between data elements considered and weighed, and a statistical distribution selected. Nonetheless, statistical analysis is an important capability that should be put to wider use. However, a method of unstructured analytics that does not require as rigorous a skill set is also available.

Data Discovery

Data discovery tools promote ease of data analysis and end user self service by not adhering to the traditional BI model of ETL, quality control, data structuring and OLAP delivery of structured analytics. Rather, these tools automate data loading and table joining, typically based on matching column names, to establish de facto relationships between data elements and sets of values. The purpose business intelligence tools is make data access and manipulation seamless and easy.

Data discovery tools are extremely powerful, instead of ETL, these tools appear above application databases, database views, and users’ personal Excel and Access data stores. Further, data discovery technologies facilitate the visualization and analysis of data by providing a user-friendly interface for data manipulation. These tools are perfect complement to any BI solution. This is because well designed and integrated operational data store, it can eliminate data quality, control and audit issues and become a powerful technology for data discovery, complementing structured analytic and statistical analysis capabilities. Discovering a new understanding requires the analyst to understand their business and its data, and so are best suited to power users or data analysts.

Data discovery tools are exploratory, sandbox manipulation providing you with ways to get new insights into your data. Unconstrained by a defined structure or intent to develop a statistical model, data discovery allows a user to observe data values and relationships chosen by the user’s curiosity or interest.

Insights into data discovery can often not be apparent in structured analysis. Additional metrics may evolve, becoming part of the structured analytics. With this type of data evolution, data discovery will be a powerful component in a company’s overall BI capabilities. This will enhance the capabilities provided by statistical analysis and structured analytics.

BCS Technology Business Intelligence can provide additional insight into a companies BI requirements.

Business Intelligence vendor consolidation (the cost)

Following on from my post of Business Intelligence Vendor consolidation, the price paid for these acquisitions and mergers has come under scrutiny. During Spring 2007, three takeovers of performance management competitors occurred almost simultaneously. The SAP takeover of Business Objects was announced on October 7, and IBM’s takeover of Cognos on November 12.

Only Hyperion, Applix, Business Objects and Cognos were publicly traded companies, whose price could be regarded as set by the market, with Hyperion and Business Objects being category leaders and Applix one of the fastest growing BI vendors. Cognos’s market value was artificially boosted by the growing takeover frenzy that developed during 2007.

Cartesis was less dominant, except in France, and slower growing, while OutlookSoft was not dominant in any market, and was most threatened by Microsoft PerformancePoint. On this basis, Oracle, Business Objects and Cognos probably paid something close to the ‘right’ price for their respective acquisitions, while SAP almost certainly significantly overpaid for OutlookSoft (particularly given its subsequent takeover of Business Objects and hence Cartesis as well).

The table below details the cost of each business intelligence acquisition.

Put some business intelligence in your inbox

E-mail has already changed business forever, and now business intelligence continues to accelerate that change.

Microsoft's recent partnerships with SAP, Lotus and others are cementing Office applications as a platform for more advanced business software, the new push by Microsoft with PerformancePoint and Business Edge by SAP Business Objects. What may prove a more serious threat to Microsoft's BI moves is not the product plans of other BI vendors but the question of whether up-and-coming online office software, particularly Google Apps, will provide a competing vehicle for BI information.

Instead of trying to predict the next BI takeover, it would make more sense to explore what kind of partnerships SAP Business Objects and others will form with productivity application vendors to make their tools as popular as Microsoft e-mail and spreadsheets. If BI is going to be accessed more directly by business users, it's going to have to start looking more like the tools those users already know.

Fox Business recently announced that AutoRevenue Selects Business Intelligence Leader to Move Reports Online

"Selecting Business Objects, the world's leading business intelligence software, as our reporting platform enables us to provide on-demand reports from our website with a dealer portal," said @utoRevenue General Manager, John Max Miller. "Now our dealership clients will have self-service access to their marketing reports so that they can quickly see the success of their multi-channel sales and service campaigns and other key performance indicators."

Multiple report formats, such as HTML, PDF, Excel and Word files, will be available to @utoRevenue customers online. Dealers will receive e-mail notifications when reports are ready for viewing.

"This process of integrating Business Objects into our web environment will have two phases. First, dealerships will have access on our website to view all their current reports. A second phase will give the end-user the ability to trend data and to drill down into a report and locate specific information they want to know," said Miller. Dealership management will also be able to access real-time dashboards, giving them more control and a top-down view of areas they want to focus on.

The initial release will available to dealers by the end of first quarter 2008.


Microsoft Bill Gates presenting to 100 CEOs in the Beyond Business Intelligence: Delivering a Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Information Management said

In the decade since that first CEO Summit, technology has transformed the world of business in profound ways. Back then, e-mail was just emerging as a preferred medium for business communication. E-commerce was in its infancy. Most companies still relied on faxes and phone calls to conduct business.

Today, we communicate and collaborate instantly with colleagues, customers and partners around the world. Global supply chains speed the flow of products from factory floor to store shelf. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Mobile access to e-mail is rapidly becoming the norm.

The impact on the workforce is remarkable. Productivity is higher than it's ever been. Buyers can shop the entire world without leaving their desk. Sellers have access to markets that were once beyond reach. The amount of information collected about customers, competitors and markets is unprecedented.

But there are times when it feels like all of these changes have overwhelmed the tools we use to do our day-to-day jobs. I wanted to share my thoughts on this important issue with you and other business decision makers and IT professionals.

The problem, really, is twofold. The first is information overload. Faced with the endless deluge of data that is generated every second of every day, how can we hope to keep up? And in the struggle to keep up, how can we stay focused on the tasks that are most important and deliver the greatest value?

The other problem is something I call information underload. We're flooded with information, but that doesn't mean we have tools that let us use the information effectively.



Business Intelligence: Developing a Query-Driven E-mail Delivery System is another post on MSDN Channel9.

Defining and managing the lifecycle of your data

We are in the process of helping to define the data lifecycle for 2 very different clients.

Data life cycle management (DLM) is a policy-based approach to managing the flow of a companies data throughout its life cycle: from creation and initial storage to its end of life and is deleted. DLM manages the processes involved, typically organising data into separate tiers according to specified policies, and automating data migration from one tier to another based on those criteria. For example a typical rule is; newer data, and data that must be accessed more frequently, is stored on faster, but more expensive storage media, while less critical data is stored on cheaper, but slower media.


I read Krish Krishnan's introduction to the issue of the data lifecycle. He included a reference to Bill Inmons work on Information Lifecycle Management for Data Warehousing. This was fortunate because I have always been an admirer (like so many others in the BI industry) of his work. Recently he published work on Data Warehousing 2.0 - tackling industry trends, unstructured data and the data lifecycle.

DMReview interviewed Bill here, they asked the question why do we need Data Warehouse 2.0 and his response was ...

There are two reasons for DW 2.0 - the first is for the integrity of the definition because I feel there are too many definitions floating around. The second reason is the need for a vision for the future of data warehousing, which I believe a lot of people in the industry have wrong. It came from confusion and from vendors trying to sell products. There were people building transactional systems they were calling a data warehouse; people building federated versions of a data warehouse; people building data marts that they were calling a data warehouse. Those are just some of the renditions.

When asked how do you convince a CEO about the benefits of a datawarehouse he replied ...

The whole subject of return on investment has vexed me. I have seen people take a macro approach. They say, "Okay, the data warehouse was installed, and the stock price of the corporation began to rise." I don't think data warehousing is particularly relevant to a measure like that. I started looking at a micro level and said, "Consider two companies. One company has a data warehouse, one company doesn't. What are the different information capabilities of these two companies?"

The second major case is speed of information. Once the data warehouse is built, the ability to get the information quickly in the hands of the right person in the corporation is greatly facilitated. With DW 2.0, there's also the issue of the data lifecycle, and by recognizing that, you can cut the cost of the data warehouse dramatically.

We have long known that approximately 20% of our data is stored in a structured environment. BI vendors realised it is time to address the 80% of unstructured and semi-structured data. This now provides further insights into our systems and additional understanding of our business and its profitability.

Business Objects recently aquired a product called Insight to use your unstructured text and get a more complete view of your business.

Megatrends of Business Intelligence

Complacency ... Enterprises seeking a competitive edge are looking toward competency centers, MDM, real-time deployments, data virtualization, workload management and operational intelligence. We help you answer six questions that will lead to innovative new BI strategies.

We came across this post that summarised changes and predictions in the BI market by intelligent enterprise.

Just when everyone thought there was general agreement on what business intelligence (BI) is "methods, tools and systems for manipulating quantitative data to build views and perform analysis for decision-making" the industry changes so much that we may again have competing definitions.

As the New Year unfolds, it would be easy to reduce what happened to the BI industry in 2007 to one colossal megatrend: consolidation. Oracle bought Hyperion Software. SAP acquired Business Objects (and a few others). And Cognos, which itself acquired Celequest in late 2006 and Applix in 2007, is in the process of being snapped up by IBM. To be sure, several important BI tool and platform players are still independent, including Actuate, Datawatch, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Panorama and SAS. Also unchanging is the growing presence of Microsoft, not to mention that of open source BI, the domain of Pentaho and Jaspersoft. Performance management and specialized data- and text-analytics vendors still abound. Nonetheless, it feels like the industry as a whole has turned in a new direction and will never again resemble its pre-2007 self.

Could there be more consolidation in 2008? Entirely possible: If nothing else, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are now markets unto themselves and will undoubtedly stay on the hunt to acquire software products and services that fill holes and create competitive advantages. This article explores how the consolidation trend might play out, but more importantly it presents six important megatrends in the context of questions organizations and BI practitioners must answer as they evaluate software and work to deliver on key strategies with BI.

Click here for the complete article.

Operational BI: Getting the whole company using Business Intelligence

The major vendors are all making conversations about Operational BI or Pervasive BI.

Companies are trying to raise the competitive bar through improvement of many operational business processes, including customer experiences, inventory
and purchasing, systems monitoring, and business process optimisation. Organizations are attempting to increase customer loyalty, profitability, and cross-sell / upsell opportunities.

Many companies are now being pushed to deliver results despite budget constraints. This has resulted in a focus on cost and business process efficiency monitoring that will help find efficiencies and improve the bottom line.

While traditional business intelligence solutions continue to address the strategic information needs of decision makers with analysis of historical data, organizations
are starting to realize the potential of applying BI technology and approaches to more immediate information needs. The study will determine what companies are
doing to:
• Target and prioritize operational BI initiatives
• Improve customer relations, response, and performance
• Address non-customer facing operational process improvements
• Increase the availability of information for both customer-facing and other line-level knowledge
workers
• Monitor systems for opportunities to improve business performance and reduction of harmful events

The dmReview talk about "The Next Generation of Business Intelligence: Operational BI". They say ...

Operational reporting applications simply format and display the content of BTx data stores. Many business users, however, want to be able to analyze BTx data to identify potential problems and look for business trends. There are a wide variety of analysis tools available on the market. The capabilities provided by these products range from using Microsoft Excel for data analysis to advanced OLAP applications and database systems.

Operational Business Intelligence has also been labelled BI 3.0 or the next evolution of business intelligence. We recently implemented a BI solution for a client that included strategic aswell as operational Business Intelligence.

Making Business Intelligence for the masses !

I saw this video a while ago but found it on YouTube recently ...

This is Business Objects Performance Enlightenment video - let there be light.



"We are not a business intelligence company ... we are in the business of helping companies become more intelligent!"

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

It is very obvious that analysing your data can provide strategic benfits. But I am often asked how can I do it easily. There are a number of reasons to undertake strategic data analysis including:

economic pressures, just-in-time supply chain management, a more diverse and demanding customer base and government requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Business Intelligence (BI) tools bring information and insights to your business previously unknown and this is occurring in many other large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Strategic data analysis benefits an organisation in many ways including:

• Providing access to statistical and other reporting tools that expose the hidden data that is driving change and growth in an organisation but is rarely measured.
  
• Providing a single point of view into diverse data through the implementation of data mining and data farming techniques.
  
• Identifying non-traditional value measurements that are often overlooked.
  
• Creating the ability to acquire pertinent data needed to make quality decisions based upon actual business trends and conditions.
  
• Providing a way to link strategic enterprise data to current and planned business activities.
  
• Providing access to competitive intelligence in order to create a competitive advantage.
  
• Tracking and measuring Key Performance Indicators.
  

Effective decision support systems depend upon management’s ability to understand an organisation’s underlying data. Key business activities including sales and marketing activities, financial and human resources management and planning, and the activities of other departments are improved when key decision makers have access to the tools necessary to perform strategic data analysis. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

The gap between the ability to link business performance with strategic data is being bridged by the technology delivered by Business Intelligence (BI) tool providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and Business Objects.

Recognising that different businesses have different BI needs, Microsoft offers a suite of BI tools that scale to fit the needs of both technical and non-technical users in small, mid-size and large organisations. These tools are fully compatible with its own line of database products as well as those provided by SAP and other manufacturers. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Viewed more as a BI and strategic data analysis tool provider for mid-sized and large organisations, Oracle offers business intelligence and data warehousing tools including a suite of ETL, OLAP, and Data Mining software products.

Business Objects is also a key player in the strategic data analysis and BI market with their suite of tools that supports major manufacturers including Siebel, Teradata, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and Informatica.

The journey to improving business performance begins with the organisations commitment to performing strategic data analysis and employing BI solutions from the industry’s leading suppliers of quality BI and strategic data analysis tools.

The benefits of Business Intelligence

The Benefits of Business Intelligence

I am often asked what can Business Intelligence do for my business. So my response is usually ...

Business Intelligence (BI) is both a management process as well as a collection of software applications and underlying technology that enables organisations to make better business decisions by exposing key metrics that drive the organisation

.

Business Intelligence is sometimes confused with Competitive Intelligence but they are not the same concepts. This is true even though BI technology does give management a methodology for getting a better grasp on the internal and external forces that are driving their organisation as well as a way to measure their organisation’s performance against the performance of their competitors.

Properly used, BI systems assist management in developing a data-based decision making model that provides more consistent results when compared to non-BI methods. Organisations that have successfully implemented BI systems have better and timelier access to customer activities, marketplace trends, supply chain issues and a host of other key performance indicators (KPIs) that are not able to be easily measured in a non-BI environment.


The Technology Behind The Business Intelligence Process

All of the data that BI systems access comes from the organisation’s data warehouse which is a specially-designed database that stores integrated data from various sources from within the organisation.

Business intelligence analysts perform data mining, which is the process of analyzing the data in the data warehouse to uncover patterns and relationships, using specialised BI tools such as Microsoft BI, Oracle BI and Business Objects BI.

Because BI needs vary among business sectors, many BI tools are highly industry-specific. Even so, most BI tools provide a similar core suite of capabilities which include executive reporting tools and a management dashboard that aggregates data and provides a high-level view of the organisation from a BI perspective.

Many organisations employ BI strategies in order to support the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) success measurement program. Unlike traditional measurements which are solely financial-based, the BSC approach measures both the financial lagging indicators as well as well as a variety of future performance indicators which are called leading measures. The BSC approach works so well because it not only provides a means for analyzing financial indicators, it also provides a way to quantify an organisation's other value drivers including its learning and growth perspective, business process perspective and its customer perspective.

Companies such as Exxon/Mobile and Cigna Insurance credit their profitability and explosive growth to implementing a BI/BSC strategy that enabled them to precisely gauge their market opportunities and position their companies to become financial and performance leaders in their market niches.

Business Intelligence is a process that works for any size organisation that is dedicated to gaining a competitive edge and raise their visibility in a crowded marketplace.

Business Intelligence - Vendor Consolidation

The OLAP report says

The BI industry has seen a wave of acquisitions since the mid 1990s, with takeovers occurring every few months. The first wave was mainly other companies who were attracted by the higher growth rates in the BI industry and preferred to buy an existing vendor rather than to develop their own product. These changes of ownership did not produce any ‘consolidation’ because there was no net reduction in the number of BI vendors or products. There was also no reduction in competition as market shares were not concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Year Acquirer Price Company acquired Product
2007 SAP Pilot Software PilotWorks
2007 Oracle $3.3bn Hyperion Solutions Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, former Brio
2007 Business Objects €225m (~$300m) Cartesis Cartesis Finance, Planning and Analytics
2007 SAP $375m? OutlookSoft OutlookSoft 5 (formerly Everest)
2007 Cognos $339m, $306m net Applix TM1 and Executive Viewer
2007 Exact Software $51.5m Longview Solutions Khalix
2007 SAP $6.8bn Business Objects BusinessObjects, Crystal, Cartesis
2007 IBM $5bn Cognos Cognos 8, Planning, Controller, TM1
2006 Golden Gate Capital (Extensity) Geac MPC
2006 Microsoft ~$50m ProClarity Corporation ProClarity
2006 Applix $14.5m Temtec Executive Viewer
2006 Infor (Golden Gate Capital) MIS DecisionWare (including Alea)
2006 Infor (Golden Gate Capital) Extensity MPC and DecisionWare
2006 Business Objects $56m ALG EPO
2005 Cartesis INEA
2005 Business Objects $100m SRC
2005 Oracle Siebel Siebel Analytics
2004 Apax Partners Funds Cartesis Magnitude
2004 IBM Alphablox
2004 Cognos $52m Frango Controller, Consolidator
2004 Sage Group IntelligentApps
2003 Cognos $157m Adaytum e.Planning
2003 Geac $52m Comshare MPC and Decision
2003 China Development Corporation CIP Executive Suite
2003 Hyperion Solutions $142m Brio Software Intelligence
2003 Business Objects $1.2bn Crystal Decisions Analysis, Holos
2003 Systems Union $42m MIS AG DecisionWare (including Alea), onVision, Plain and DeltaMiner
2002 Open Ratings Gentia
2002 SymphonyRPM WhiteLight
2002 Pilot Software Acquisition Corporation $1.5m Pilot
2001 SPSS $94m Showcase Strategy
2001 Microsoft ~$15m Maximal Max (later renamed to Data Analyzer)
2001 IBM Informix MetaCube
2000 Business Objects $15m OLAP@Work
2000 CA Sterling EUREKA:Suite
2000 Accrue $19m Pilot Software
2000 Broadbase $10m Decision·ism Aclue
1999 Brio Technology, subsequently renamed to Brio Software $250m SQRIBE
1999 Hyperion Solutions $15.5m Sapling
1999 PwC Cartesis Carat
1999 CA Platinum Technology InfoBeacon (later renamed DecisionBase)
1999 Sterling $168m Information Advantage MyEureka!
1999 Business Objects $8m Next Action Technology AnswerSets (later renamed to Set Analyzer)
1998 Arbor Software, immediately renamed to Hyperion Solutions $600m Hyperion Software Enterprise, Pillar
1998 Information Advantage $36m IQ Software Data-Vision
1997 Platinum Equity Holdings ~$5m? Pilot Software
1997 Hummingbird Andyne PaBLO
1997 Arbor Software $6.7m AppSource WIRED for OLAP
1996 Seagate Software $84m Holistic Systems Holos
1996 Applix $11m Sinper TM1
1996 Microsoft ~$15m? Panorama relaunched as OLAP Services
1995 DecisionWorks IOC Track
1995 Oracle $100m IRI Software Express
1995 IQ Software $5.2m Soft Systems Data-Vision
1995 Informix $16.5m STG MetaCube
1995 Platinum Technology $36m Prodea Beacon
1994 Dun & Bradstreet ~$28m Pilot LightShip
1994 Speedware Info-Innov Media


I have worked with Microsoft, Business Objects (now owned by SAP) and Oracle. Some of the vendors I have never heard of but now there is a very small list of vendors.

They include:

• SAP


• Oracle


• Microsoft


• IBM

5 reasons to embrace Business Intelligence

Top 5 Reasons Every Business Should Embrace Business Intelligence

How many times has the justification or question for embarking on a BI program been reduced to cost ?

I often recommend the following ...

Escalating business costs and increased completeness are enough reasons alone to
seriously consider implementing a solid Business Intelligence program.

When Veneta Research surveyed over 400 companies on their BI expectations, the five most commonly cited reasons for embracing BI were these:

1. Improved competitiveness

BI provides an organisation with the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time. This enables the organization to fine-tune its supply chain management and provide tighter integration and better communication between all supply chain members and partners.

2. Improved customer service

Business intelligence allows organizations to monitor and respond to changes and trends in the marketplace. BI tools also allow an organization to respond to changes in the way that customers behave and match that behavior to offerings designed to match customer needs.

3. Improved profitability

Because BI makes data accessible and displays it in meaningful ways, organisations can identify cost-cutting opportunities, gain more leverage during vendor negotiations, better manage its supply chain and identify optimal price points for its goods and services.

4. Improved revenue generation

Accessible data and improved reporting capabilities combine to provide an organization with the ability to identify new market opportunities by analyzing and responding to changing customer demographics and a variety of variable market conditions.

5. Improved capacity

With access to powerful decision-support tools comes the ability to build more accurate predictive models. This provides an organization with the ability to improve capacity planning by enabling them to switch from reactive business strategies to proactive business strategies.

There is no question that BI provides value to competitive organsations that are seeking strategic ways to support growth and profitability. Improved performance is always the # 1 motivator behind implementing and embracing a business intelligence system.

Business Intelligence Tools such as management reporting systems, management dashboards and OLAP are just some of the driving forces behind a new breed of empowered employee who is now capable of making accurate and informed business decisions that are based on known facts rather than making ill informed choices that result from having to guess at what the current state of the organisation is and what the future holds for their marketplace.

The process of implementing an effective BI program has been made much easier thanks to a plethora of next-generation tools from companies like Microsoft BI, Oracle BI and Business Objects BI.

Business Objects and Microsoft To Make War in the Midmarket

Another question asked regularly is what Business Intelligence products are suited for mid sized companies often referred to as SMEs.

Doug Henschen of intelligent enterprise

Seeing a huge market opportunity to sell business intelligence software to companies with 100 to 1,000 employees and $100 million to $1 billion in revenue, Business Objects today announced a major new-product family and larger initiative aimed at catering to midsized companies. The midmarket now buys $2.1 billion worth of BI software each year, according to IDC, and Business Objects says that figure is growing 12.5 percent per year — 50 percent faster than BI sales growth among large enterprises.

To cater to the tighter budgets and leaner IT staffs of midsized companies, Business Objects is introducing Crystal Decisions, a “holistic” product that will be offered in Standard, Professional and Premium editions. The Standard edition, which includes reporting, query and analysis, is being released today starting at $20,000. The Pro and Premium editions, which will add data integration and performance management capabilities, will debut in the second and fourth quarter, respectively. All three editions will be able to deliver data, reports and analyses within Microsoft Office and SharePoint.

Microsoft includes integration technologies with SQL Server, something only available in the Pro and Premium editions of Crystal Decisions, but Rowe says Crystal Decisions will deliver more extensive data quality, data cleansing and ETL capabilities. Microsoft's PerformancePoint Server, based in part on ProClarity products Microsoft acquired last year, debuted in mid 2007. Crystal Decisions Premium, which will include goal, metric, scorecard, trend and collaboration features, won't debut until the fourth quarter.

Update: Microsoft launched its Performance Point recently with a well organised Business Intelligence Summit. This day long event was well worth attending !