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Think Big, Spend Little - Microsoft Announces its Business Intelligence Strategy

5/12/2009 7:00:00 AM

While companies have long understood the power of Business Intelligence (BI), they have been slow to adopt the technologies that provide real-time insight into what is happening within their organizations.  The reason is simple - low user adoption of what has been very expensive products that had a high user learning curve.

On January 27, 2009, Microsoft changed all that with their announcement of bringing “BI to the masses” by consolidating the scorecards, dashboard and analytical capabilities found within Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise and branding them as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint and discontinuing the stand‑alone version of Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Kurt DelBene, Senior Vice President of the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft said, “The decision is based on wanting customers to truly experience pervasive BI in their organization at a low cost through the tools they use every day.”  Adding that, “In today’s economic climate, having the most pertinent information available, allowing you to clearly view the health of your organization, is imperative.”  The move will provide “customers what they need in a way that makes sense for their business – through the widely adopted Office SharePoint Server, the planning and analysis tool Microsoft Office Excel, and the highly scalable Microsoft SQL Server.”

Who Benefits:

• Executives and Line-of-Business Managers: The solution can provide Executives and Line-of-Business Managers with real-time, actionable intelligence about the state of their business. Scorecards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide a top-level summary view of the business.  They can be used to spot areas where managers need to drill down further using detailed reports about the state of specific lines of business and even down to the transactional business system.
• Business Users: Business users can get real-time, contextual customer insight within Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office Outlook.  This information can enable them to sell more to existing customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve business efficiency.
• Business Analysts: Business analysts can create custom reports and analytics easier and faster and develop new reports in Excel or PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer without engaging IT.
• Developers and IT: The solution can reduce cost of user training and ongoing maintenance work by enabling users to create their own reports in the familiar environment of Excel.  The pre-built templates and guidelines included in the Analytics Accelerator can facilitate the development of custom analytics.

This is great news for customers who currently own both SharePoint Server Enterprise and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as license holders will now be entitled to get PerformancePoint Server at no additional cost and leverage the Analytics Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to create powerful BI solutions for Dynamics CRM.

 

Ivan Kurtev, Director of CRM Delivery for Newton, MA-based Green Beacon Solutions:

Mr. Kurtev has worked on numerous CRM implementations as a developer, technical lead, and solution architect. Ivan is currently a CRM Solution Specialist acting as an internal subject matter expert for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and primary resource for CRM software demos. Ivan is also responsible for identifying best practices from client engagement and incorporating them in the Green Beacon Lightship methodology and CompassPoint solution portfolio.

Mr. Kurtev is a highly-regarded speaker and thought leader within the CRM Community and provides solution presentations to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Group (CRMUG)