Microsoft Touts Smarter, Thinner Office Business Intelligence Added to Office Clint Boulton
Microsoft (Quote, Chart) believes business intelligence should be added to a suite that employees use to collaborate and manage their workflow -- Office.
The Redmond, Wash., company today unveiled Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, a business performance management server application to improve the user experience of corporate workers.
The software, available November 1, injects the BI technology that would normally be found in the SQL Server database platform into Office, helping employees pump out personalized scorecards to track key performance indicators (KPIs) against goals.
Microsoft said it will sell the scorecard application for $5,000 per server, and a client access license of $175 per seat. This is generally thousands less than software products from leading BI vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos.
Office 12 Excel will help workers maintain a persistent connection between their Excel spreadsheet and the data source so that spreadsheets created with Excel can be updated with ease. New features include support for SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, expanded spreadsheet capacity and better sorting and filtering tools.
Office 12 SharePoint will leverage new Excel Services to allow customers to more effectively secure, share, and manage spreadsheets on the server and allow them to be viewed via a Web browser or downloaded to the desktop.
The inclusion of BI in Excel is an obvious strategic choice for Microsoft: IDC said Excel has been the most widely used end-user tool for BI. It has also been the most difficult to deploy for Web-based collaboration and computing.
The announcement is yet one more example of the ongoing shift in the computing industry from desktop-maroooned applications to Web-based applications that reside on a server. Take the recent collaboration from Google (Quote, Chart) and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) that is expected to lead to Web-based office productivity software, such as OpenOffice.org, the open source office productivity suite.
Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, will detail the scorecard news during a Web conference at 1 p.m. PDT today. He is expected to detail how Microsoft is looking to make BI more of a team tool as opposed to a utility used by an individual worker to cull results. The company also sees the potential of BI to become part of the business process.
Until now, BI software has been too complex, costly and disconnected from the software tools people use every day to do their jobs, Raikes said.
The investments the company is making in Microsoft Office will make BI and the business insights gleaned from it more pervasive, thereby enhancing the impact of people throughout an organization, which leads to greater overall business success, he added.
Raikes comments about complex, costly software are a shot across the bows of business intelligence software incumbents Business Objects (Quote, Chart)and Cognos (Quote, Chart), from whom Microsoft is intent on stealing market share.
IDC claims the BI software market has experienced a 17 percent compound annual growth rate over the last 10 years, to reach $4.3 billion in revenue worldwide. Corporations all over the world covet software that gives their employees pertinent information faster, and in a clear report with helpful graphics.
Microsoft will also showcase how BI tools are being added to the next release of Microsoft Office Excel and SharePoint products, code-named Microsoft Office 12. Both will integrate with SQL Server 2005, which will be launched November 7 in San Francisco, along with Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.
