Microsoft BI Team Gears Up for 2010Microsoft BI Team Gears Up for 2010

Microsoft announced last week that its next Business Intelligence Conference, originally slated for October 2009 in Seattle, has been pushed back one full year to October 2010. I thought this event was on an 18-month cycle to begin with, so I wasn't disappointed. I also wasn't surprised given that Microsoft BI exec Guy Weismantel shared that news with Intelligent Enterprise earlier in the week as part of a press tour. Weismantel also said the much-anticipated Gemini (in-memory technology) and Kilimanjaro (scale-out data warehousing) releases are on track for the first half of 2010. So won't a Fall 2010 event be anti-climactic?

Microsoft' s explanation for the change in event plans was as follows: Through 2009 and 2010 we will see more news and advancements around Microsoft BI as we lead into the launches of the next versions of Office and SQL Server. Due to this flurry of activity, and the global economic constraints on travel budgets worldwide, we are moving the BI conference to a bi-annual event. The next BI Conference, scheduled for October 2009, will be moved to October 2010 in Seattle, WA, and all further BI Conferences will be held every second year on an ongoing basis.The notice went on to explain that for this year, BI solutions and capabilities will be covered at the SharePoint Conference (October in Las Vegas) and PASS Summit Unite 2009 (November in Seattle).

The main thrust of Weismantel's message was that despite some disappointment about Microsoft's February move to end development of the PerformancePoint server, there has been overwhelming support for the compensating move to bundle dashboarding and scorecarding into the Enterprise edition of SharePoint.

"Millions of SharePoint customers are now in a position where they don't have to buy BI," Weismantel explained. "They can get it for free" by virtue of using the combination of SharePoint, SQL Server and Microsoft Office.

It was interesting to hear Weismantel describe the BI team as "little us sitting in the middle of two multi-billion-dollar product groups," meaning the Office and SQL Server product teams. The contrast might be stark within the offices in Redmond, yet Microsoft is the fourth-largest player in the BI tools market (after SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and Oracle), with more than $530 million in annual revenue, according to IDC's 2008 estimates.

As for the next releases of Office and SQL Server, Weismantel said the good news is that both releases will be shipping in the same timeframe in the first half of next year (with beta releases in the second half of this year). If past habits are any indication, Microsoft's corporate customers will not be quick to upgrade to those new releases. Nonetheless, Weimantel said the next release of Excel Services for SharePoint will expose new capabilities for reporting and analysis even for those who have yet to upgrade to the latest Office and SQL Server releases. Thus, he said, it will take only one leg of the Office/SQL Server/SharePoint stool to bolster BI capabilities next year. However, you won't get all the new bells and whistles (like in-memory analysis and scale-out data warehousing) without upgrades.

If the Office and SQL upgrades make it just under the wire for a "release to production" in June 2010, it would push the real, in-the-field product arrival back several months; so perhaps a Fall 2010 event won't be so anti-climactic after all. It will also give Microsoft plenty of time to come up with compelling demos, and hopefully they'll be led by beta customers.

As Cindi Howson's recent report on in-memory technology made clear, the Gemini analysis functionality is highly anticipated. And on the data warehousing front, the (Kilimanjaro) combination of DATAllegro and SQL Server has its skeptics. It will be important for Microsoft to demonstrate solid progress on both fronts by that late date.Microsoft announced last week that its next Business Intelligence Conference, originally slated for October 2009 in Seattle, has been pushed back one full year to October 2010. I thought this event was on an 18-month cycle to begin with, so I wasn't disappointed... But won't a Fall 2010 event be anti-climactic?