Hear BI Survey Results, Plus Donald FarmerHear BI Survey Results, Plus Donald Farmer

I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...Joining us to bring a practitioner's perspective to the proceedings will be Joseph Openshaw, director of merchandising services at Meijer, who will talk about query and analysis needs at this Midwest-based discount retailer.

It's an honor for me to co-present with Farmer, whose Scottish brogue, long hair and mastery of all things Microsoft BI (and most BI-related topics) have made him a cult figure -- sought out for consultation at BI events and loudly applauded for his smooth, insightful demos and presentations. I'm sure he'll dazzle on Thursday while I do my comparatively workmanlike job of presenting what I think are some pretty interesting survey findings.

This week's Webinar is sponsored by Microsoft, but TechWeb has always been a strictly church-and-state operation, meaning we don't treat advertisers or sponsors any differently than other vendors. So I won't be dwelling on Microsoft or Microsoft customers. In fact, I'm not even going to show or mention this fairly juicy chart from our latest BI survey that makes Microsoft look pretty formidable.

The truth is, Microsoft is in a pretty good position when you consider the prevalence of Excel, SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server out there. That's propelling double-digit gains in Microsoft's BI marketshare. That said, analysts like IDC and Gartner have to do some pretty fancy calculations to try to separate use of Excel, the ordinary spreadsheet, from Excel, the interface actually used for BI-style analysis. That's why I buried this chart at the back of the report and qualified it as described above. It's an interesting chart, but I didn't write any headlines about these findings and I won't talk about them on Thursday.

You will hear plenty of other interesting findings from our survey on Thursday, and they are based on polling of more than 500 end users. Please do register and join us on Thursday and you'll hear solid research findings, real-world testimony from Meijer, plus Donald Farmer.I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...