BI News - Microsoft "Dynamic Business Will Survive Recession

Business Intellignece News : Microsoft: 'Dynamic' businesses will survive recession

Microsoft's Convergence conference opened Tuesday in New Orleans with a message and a string of new offerings meant to ease ...

Topics : BI News, Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions, Microsoft Dynamic Business

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services MS SQL SSAS

With SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services provides, for the first time, a unified and integrated view of all your business data as the foundation for all of your traditional reporting, OLAP analysis, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards and data mining.

By introducing a single Unified Dimensional Model (UDM), Analysis Services combines the flexibility and richness of the traditional relational reporting model with the user-friendly powerful analytics and the superb performance of the classic OLAP model.

With Proactive Caching and advanced business intelligence capabilities, Analysis Services moves into the realm of real-time analytics while maintaining MOLAP class performance.

Major enhancements in enterprise capabilities including scalability, manageability, and productivity, soundly position Analysis Services as the cornerstone of your Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure and with the deep integration with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and with Microsoft Office, Analysis Services 2005 will extend business intelligence to every level of your business.

Unified Dimensional Model
By combining the best aspects of traditional OLAP analysis and relational reporting, Analysis Services 2005 provides a metadata model that covers both sets of needs. A set of cubes and dimensions defined in Analysis Services 2005 is referred to as a Unified Dimensional Model, or UDM. The UDM is a central metadata repository defining business entities, business logic, calculations, and metrics that serves as the source for all reports, spreadsheets, OLAP browsers, KPIs and analytical applications.

Using the powerful new Data Source View feature, the UDM is mapped to a host of heterogeneous back-end data sources allowing a complete and integrated picture of the business regardless of the location of the data.

With the UDM's friendly descriptions of the business entities, navigation hierarchies, multiple perspectives, and even automatic translations to native languages the end-users will find it easy to explore the corporate business data.

Proactive Caching
Proactive Caching enables the combination of real-time updates with MOLAP class performance. Analysis Services 2005 maintains a highly compressed and optimized data cache that gets automatically maintained as the data in the underlying source databases changes. The cache provides superb query performance and isolates the back-end source systems from the load of the analytical queries.

Advanced Business Intelligence
Key Performance Indicator (KPI). The KPI framework provides a rich centralized repository defining key metrics and scorecards. The KPI framework in Analysis Services 2005 allows you to easily build balanced scorecard and other types of business performance management applications.

Translations. Translations provide a simple, centrally-managed mechanism for storing and presenting analytic data to users in their preferred languages. * MDX Scripts. MDX Scripts are the new mechanism for defining Calculated Members, Named Sets, and Cell Calculations. * Business Intelligence Wizards. A set of easy to use wizards will help even the most novice user in modeling some of the more complex business intelligence problems. * Semi-Additive Measures. New measure aggregation type for advance data modeling includes last-non-empty, last-child, first-child, average-of-children and even by-account-type.

Web Services
XML for Analysis (XML/A) is the native, standards-based protocol for communicating with the Analysis Services server. New kinds of applications are enabled and easy to develop - applications that integrate analytics with operations in real time that can access the data from any platform and any language.

With XML/A as the native protocol, Analysis Services clients can be configured to have a zero footprint, and each server is automatically a web service. * A light-footprint Win32 layer is available for backward compatibility with tools that work with Analysis Services 2000 on OLE DB for OLAP, ADOMD, and ADOMD.Net.

Enterprise Capabilities
Analysis Services 2005 sets a new standard for BI servers in enterprise scalability, manageability, and productivity:

• Scalability. Analysis Services 2005 scales to the most demanding analytical and reporting applications. With Analysis Services' new dimension architecture, UDM-enabled applications allow users to quickly perform rich and intuitive adhoc analysis using hundreds of dimensions and hierarchies. Hierarchies, whether flat or multilevel, make it easier for the users to navigate and query UDMs with hundreds of millions of members.
• The new architecture also removes the limitations of memory resident dimensions and the number of children members per parent. With XML/A-based communication protocol that is paired with greatly optimized role based security; Analysis Services 2005 allows a UDM to handle thousands of users, enabling enterprise scale BI applications using web/middle tier or client/server architectures. Additionally, with parallelized partition and dimension processing Analysis Services can handle more data faster.
• Manageability. By integrating the management tools for the relational engine and Analysis Services, the BI administrator benefits from having a single uniform environment for managing Analysis Services along with SQL Server. With SQL Management Studio, administrators can easily script Analysis Services objects and operations/tasks. Administrators can use a rich editor for MDX and DMX queries. Profiler can be used to trace, capture, and replay Analysis Services queries and other commands. Multi-Instancing, enhanced backup and restore, synchronization of databases across servers, and improved fine-grained administrative permissions are some of the new manageability tools available.
• Productivity. Integrated with Visual Studio, Analysis Services intuitive wizards and editors provide a true application development environment supporting the full life cycle of the project. Source control, versioning, workstation isolation, embedded debugging, and configuration management are some of the benefit of the new BI Development Studio. Additional Information.

Source: For more information on business intelligence BI software, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, check out http://www.calumo.com/microsoftsqlserveranalysis.html

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Business Intelligence Software : Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Business intelligence (BI) helps you tackle one of biggest challenges your organization faces: getting the right information into the hands of the right people. SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is a comprehensive managed reporting solution that supports the entire report lifecycle.
With Reporting Services you can create, personalize, manage, and deliver reports from different data sources in a variety of formats, including traditional paper-based reports, as well as interactive, Web-based, embedded, and ad hoc reports.

Source: For more information on business intelligence software, Microsoft Reporting Services, check out http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/sqlserver2005_reporting_services.aspx

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

Business Intelligence Software : Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

To solve complex business problems and gain insight into the performance of your organization, you need to be able to rapidly and effectively analyze data. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is the online analytical processing (OLAP) engine and data mining platform within SQL Server 2005.

An integral component of Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI), Analysis Services provides a central place that serves as the single version of truth for your reports, spreadsheets, key performance indicators (KPIs), and analytical applications.

With Analysis Services, you can put your data in a format that is optimized for rapid query and analysis and from which you can easily generate and store KPIs. This can help you access the BI information you need to understand what's happening in your business and predict what will happen in the future.

Source: For more information on business intelligence software Microsoft Analysis Services, check out http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/sqlserver2005_analysis_services.aspx

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Business Intelligence Software : Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

For most companies, the quantity of data is not a problem. Organizational and technological problems arise when your data is detached and dispersed in multiple operational systems, databases, and external third-party feeds. These issues can make data integration the most expensive part of a business intelligence (BI) project.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services provides a scalable, extensible solution that helps you easily and quickly integrate data from any source. Integration Services is designed to perform complex data integration, transformation, and synthesis at high speeds and in a continuous environment for large data volumes. Integration Services can help you easily build, manage, and deploy solutions that bring your data under control in a consolidated, centralized, and managed environment.

Source: For more information on business intelligence software Microsoft SQL Server, check out http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/sqlserver2005_integration_services.aspx

Microsoft BI - PerformancePoint Server 2007: Planning

Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software Products : PerformancePoint Server 2007: Planning

Get broad participation without losing control

Plans, forecasts, and budgets are critical and influence decisions every day. Even though people gain valuable insights from them, plans are often only created and updated on an "as needed" basis. We all go through planning and budgeting, but does the process need to be so time-consuming?

Instead, imagine full participation with everyone using a familiar interface, a flexible infrastructure, and a low-cost solution that manages the complexity so you don't have to. Better still, imagine how timely updates and accuracy will drive performance throughout your organization.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 delivers all that, and it can help you:

• Drive consistency throughout your organization.
• Span planning needs across your enterprise.
• Extend your investments in Microsoft's business intelligence (BI) solution.
• Provide every employee with a stake in corporate performance management.

The planning capabilities of PerformancePoint Server put familiar tools into the hands of contributors across your organization, giving them a flexible, powerful environment that supports the budgeting and planning processes.

Source: For more information on Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software Products, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/pps2007_planning.aspx

Microsoft BI - PerformancePoint Server 2007: Analytics

Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software Products : PerformancePoint Server 2007: Analytics

Move easily from monitoring to rooting out causes

Rich and powerful analytic capabilities can give you answers to the "why" questions:

• Why did performance dip when you expected it to peak?
• Why are sales underperforming?
• Why is a forecast off-target?

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you answer the most important questions through a set of powerful, integrated analytic capabilities with advanced visualizations. In the end, you get a seamless experience between monitoring data and discovering the root cause of an issue, which means you can take quick action to get performance back on track.

Source: For more Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software products, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/pps2007_analytics.aspx

Microsoft BI - PerformancePoint Server 2007: Monitoring

Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software Products : PerformancePoint Server 2007: Monitoring

See what's going on at any given time
Understanding what is happening at any given time within your organization is critical to effective performance management. You need to be able to:

• Check progress against team and corporate goals.
• Learn how a division, subsidiary, or team is performing against organizational targets.
• See how individual goals affect overall company strategy.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 offers rich visualizations, user-friendly design, and an integrated ability to work with the familiar Microsoft Office system environment. All this makes it easy to build, personalize, manage, and deploy the robust scorecards and dashboards that enable your people to continually monitor what's happening within your organization.

Source: For more Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software products, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/pps2007_monitoring.aspx

Microsoft BI PerformancePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Business Intelligence BI Software Products : PerformancePoint Server 2007

Performance management with a familiar interface

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 was designed specifically to help improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of your organization. An integrated application, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built to support formal organizational business intelligence (BI) and performance management processes.

With PerformancePoint Server 2007, you can:

Monitor: Monitor progress in a scorecard or dashboard.

Analyze: Quickly analyze what is driving variances against anticipated or planned outcomes.

Plan: Adjust your corporate plan or budget to meet changing business conditions.

Built on the highly secure, scalable Microsoft BI platform, PerformancePoint Server delivers formal centralized and managed performance management tools and processes in the familiar, easy-to-use 2007 Microsoft Office system environment. A key component of the Microsoft BI offering, PerformancePoint Server can help you align organizational performance with individual and team goals and objectives.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/pps2007_overview.aspx

Business Intelligence Software Vendors - Microsoft

Microsoft - BI Solutions

As a challenger with significant market presence and resources, Microsoft has historically adopted a follower's, rather than a leader's approach, for its BI platforms and applications products. In 2006, Microsoft executed a more coordinated and unified BI strategy across several of its business and product units (including the Office and SQL server product lines).

Today, the capabilities and integration of its current BI platform offerings have improved significantly, but are still not as mature as those of the market leaders. Micorsoft's BI products will appeal to the large community of Microsoft application developers, and the pricing, packaging and integration with its Office (including PerfomancePoint Server) and SQL Server products will be attractive to organizations that have standardized on the Microsoft information infrastructure. Many departmental and business unit end users who hear the Office integration marketing messages for BI will likely ask for the products and associated support from their IT departments.

However, organizations that have heterogeneous applications, information infrastructure and development environments will find the Microsoft BI-related marketing and announcements to be interesting but potentially distracting, since they may not easily integrate with their existing investments in infrastructure and applications.

We expect that Microsoft will continue to grow its BI investments, leveraging the integration and product strength of Office and SQL Server, become a stronger competitor and, ultimately, a leader in the marketplace by 2012 (see "Microsoft Strengthens Business Intelligence and Performance Management Offerings" and "Microsoft Plans to Close Business Intelligence Product Gap and Shift Competitive Position With ProClarity").

Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/145507.html

Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions

Business Intelligence Solutions - Microsoft

Microsoft offers you a complete, fully integrated business intelligence (BI) solution. With Microsoft Business Intelligence, you get a rich set of technologies—many of which your organization already uses—and a flexible, easy-to-use solution that helps extend the value of your enterprise data.

SQL Server 2005

An enterprise-scalable, secure, and proven BI platform for integrating, storing, and managing your data assets.

• SQL Server 2005 Integration Services - An ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool built into SQL Server that brings your data assets together into a central data warehouse.
• SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services - An online analytical process (OLAP) engine built into SQL Server that structures your data into multidimensional cubes optimized for analysis.
• SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - A reporting tool built into SQL Server that builds enterprise and production reports from your relational databases or your central data warehouse.

The 2007 Microsoft Office System

A widely used set of desktop and server software, tightly integrated with SQL Server 2005, which enables users to access, analyze, collaborate, and share information in a familiar environment.

• Microsoft Office Excel 2007 - Easily connect to, analyze, and share data that is centrally stored and managed.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Facilitate communication and collaboration. SharePoint Server is the place where people can find the information they need, whether it is a corporate scorecard, a spreadsheet, or a Microsoft Office PowerPoint slide deck.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

A performance management application that provides three key capabilities—monitoring, analyzing, and planning—that help organizations align their business to strategic corporate goals and objectives.

• PerformancePoint Monitoring - Define and use scorecards, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive accountability and alignment across your organization.
• PerformancePoint Analysis - Easily analyze and identify trends, opportunities, and threats in your data. Capture and share that information using the intuitive and collaborative environment of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
• PerformancePoint Planning - Simplify the process of business planning, budgeting, and forecasting—all through the familiar and easy-to-use environment of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/default.aspx