Microsoft Posts BI Tools for Microsoft OfficeMicrosoft Posts BI Tools for Microsoft Office

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

Microsoft has released two new business intelligence (BI) add-ins for Microsoft Office: the Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services and the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator. The former enables Excel-based analysis of data stored in Analysis Services cubes; the latter provides capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Portal (and Services) to create and manage business performance management scorecards. Ventana Research believes that BI should be on every desktop to improve the performance management capability of everyone in the organization. Ventana Research finds these add-ons as interesting but not yet comparable to other enterprise architected and validated solutions.

Assessment

Microsoft’s business intelligence strategy continues to look like it merely comprises a series of initiatives among Microsoft business units — in particular Office, SQL Server, and Microsoft Business Solutions. It’s now possible to work with Microsoft Analysis Services cubes and create scorecards in a number of Microsoft tools and applications. The question for end-users and Microsoft’s partners is which of these offerings to invest time and effort into, or whether to simply ignore Microsoft BI for the moment and stick with BI vendors who at least are more focused on delivering a coherent BI offering.

Naturally, these new BI offerings complement and depend on specific components of the Microsoft technology stack and allow businesses heavily invested in Office technologies and skills to gain further ROI from their efforts. But there remains a question about whether the desktop productivity focus of the Office platform and group is appropriate for the development and support of business management applications like BI. Ventana Research believes that this BI approach is interesting because it points to an increasing awareness in Microsoft of the need to leverage the BI platform within Microsoft SQL Server. But these offerings are just a first step and while they deliver BI capabilities onto the desktop, they will not substantially impact an organization's enterprise-wide BI strategy.

Market Impact

The ability to analyze Microsoft Analysis Services cubes in Microsoft Excel and create scorecards in portals has been around in the marketplace for some years now. From a functional perspective, there is nothing new here; Microsoft is playing catch-up. But Microsoft Office is rapidly becoming a BI Trojan horse as more BI capability is baked-in and more desktops begin to use it simply because it’s there. So as these products are improved, they could eventually have an impact on the market, simply because of the penetration of Office on corporate desktops. Until then, mid-market and enterprise providers like Business Objects, Cognos, Corporate Radar, DataBeacon, and Hyperion will continue to offer much more complete and mature performance management offerings.

Recommendation

Ventana Research recommends that SMB/SME organizations already leveraging Excel and SharePoint and with limited IT resources and minimal BI budget should assess these offerings against other mid-market BI offerings. Larger organizations should evaluate these Microsoft offerings against more mature products that already exist in this space and adopt a “watch and wait” approach to any widespread adoption. The Office BI add-ins could be the means to pilot low-cost, low-commitment BI initiatives in order to explore ways to make more use of transactional data stored in SQL Server databases or to round out existing SharePoint portal investments. Companies should approach enterprise rollouts to anything more than workgroups of a few dozen users with caution, as the scalability of these offerings have not been proven in larger deployments.