Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Microsoft
Unleashes a Deluge of BI Goodies : "ORLANDO, Fla. Microsoft
Corp. is flooding the BI market yet again.

This time around, the company is announcing new SQL Server Report Packs
for Exchange and Business Solutions CRM; Report Builder, a tool that opens up
simple report creation to the masses; and a rechristened version of DTS (Data
Transformation Services) that will reach into nonpersistent data stores such as
those found in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds or Web services.

Bill Baker, general manager for SQL Server Business Intelligence for the
Redmond, Wash., company, is expected to announce the trio of business
intelligence announcements during his opening keynote at the PASS (Professional
Association for SQL Server) Community Summit here on Wednesday.

The report packs, which are available for free download starting on
Wednesday, provide users with modifiable templates of commonly used Reporting
Services reports. According to Alex Payne, senior product manager for SQL
Server, the report packs include templates for commonly run reports in the
current version of Exchange and in Microsoft CRM 1.2. For example, common
reports for Exchange include queries into which users send the largest e-mail
files, whose in-box is of a certain size or who receives the most e-mail. Common
reports in CRM include those concerning account details or a report on sales
pipelines that shows customer details. The Exchange Report Pack includes 13
templates, and the CRM Report Pack contains six, Payne said.

Microsoft intends to make more Report Packs available based on customer
requests, but Payne declined to say what applications they would pertain to.

Baker also is expected to confirm in his keynote that the company is
putting the ActiveViews Inc. BI technology it acquired in April into SQL Server
2005 Beta 3. The technology, which has been dubbed Reporting Services Report
Builder, is geared to enable end users to build reports in an ad hoc
environment. End users will be able to build reports from scratch or to modify
existing reports within a simple drag-and-drop environment, without having to
understand the intricacies of database schema, database connection strings or
the construction of SQL queries, Payne said, as is now the case with building
reports in Reporting Services."

Note also
that Data Transformation Services is now being renamed SQL Server Integration
Services.

There’s an interesting quote at the end of the article which is worth
repeating:

"… After determining Microsoft BI tools could handle the 1.2-terabyte
data warehouse, the next issue was price shopping. Barnes & Noble is an Oracle
Corp. database shop and so, naturally, the company priced out a BI solution
using Oracle technology. "We’re an Oracle operations shop, and it would be a
natural solution for us, but Microsoft was cheaper to do," Leary said.
Microsoft’s BI platform was 20 percent less costly, she said the figure that
clinched the deal.

That’s not a surprising scenario, according to Rob Helms, an analyst at
Directions on Microsoft, in Kirkland, Wash. "My sense of the SQL Server group
is that BI, broadly defined, is deeply important to them," he said. "They were
crediting BI for 40 percent of SQL Server sales" recently, he said. "It was a
way for SQL Server to sneak into shops that are traditionally Oracle shops."

See also this
accompanying eWeek interview with Microsoft’s Bill Baker, General Manager of
SQL Server Business Intelligence.

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