Global CIO: Microsoft Pushes BI For The Masses: 500 Million ProspectsGlobal CIO: Microsoft Pushes BI For The Masses: 500 Million Prospects

"We'll definitely leverage Office and Sharepoint and make BI easily accessible to that third group" of non-experts, said Oberoi in a conversation at information's New York City offices Wednesday. "BI needs to get to that point where Sharepoint is about ease of use and ease of creation, where non-experts can be sure they've got clean data and then say, 'Here are the reports I want, here are the people I want to share with, and I can create this on my own.' "

We all know how that's worked in the past: you go to IT, explain what you want, IT says oh sure we can do that, you ask when you can have the reports, and IT says get in line. Microsoft says it's offering a better approach.

"With PowerPivot for Excel, IT can get out of website-development and report-development and can get back to building and managing infrastructure, which is its real job," Oberoi said. "IT says, 'What about compliance and management?' And our approach is that, as with Sharepoint, the key is that BI can now be 'self-managed': with Sharepoint, IT has full insight and oversight into what's being built. As soon as a solution is published to Sharepoint, IT knows—and in the same way with PowerPivot for Excel, IT can then have an aggregate view of what's being used heavily, what's not being used at all, and how resources should be juggled accordingly."

The key to winning the trust and support of the IT organization, says Oberoi, is that built-in capacity for self-managed BI: "This allows IT to do all of its related work on a consistent infrastructure level—monitoring and managing—instead of on a project-to-project level where it has to develop and fix everything."

The report-creation tools come with PowerPivot for Excel and the collaboration tools come with PowerPivot for Sharepoint, and by leveraging those widely used and trusted platforms, Oberoi says, Microsoft is confident it can win over a whole lot of converts from the 500 million great unwashed BI prospects.

"We think it's a game-changer and truly gets to the democratization of BI."

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Ballmer's Cloud Commitment Makes Microsoft Relevant Again Global CIO: An Open Letter To Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model Global CIO: Top 10 Most Strategic Vendors' #1 Challenges Global CIO: Is Cisco Blasting To $100 Billion Or Drifting To Mediocrity? Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

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