I always felt that data warehousing had the power to truly bring benefits to an
organization, but that the choice of the proper front end tools was crucial. Therefore,
I advocated a mix of scorecards aimed at the top end of the organization, reports
for the majority of users, and powerful analytics tools for the analysts and power
users. ProClarity could handle some of this, and mixed with SQL Server Reporting
Services and Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager, businesses had a fairly
complete set of tools to deliver value from their warehouse to the entire organization.
In early 2006 I was teaching a data warehousing class to a group at Microsoft,
and I mentioned that I wished Microsoft would hurry up and buy ProClarity; a week
later the deal was announced. I believed that Microsoft buying ProClarity would be
a good thing, but the way that Microsoft would choose to integrate the ProClarity
products remained to be seen.
Several months later, Microsoft announced a new product, PerformancePoint
Server 2007. This product was to combine Business Scorecard Manager with
ProClarity??™s tools, a move that seemed to make perfect sense. In a bit of a surprise,
at least to me, Microsoft also announced the inclusion of a planning module??”a
new product that would allow businesses to budget and forecast more easily.
x v i i i B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e w i t h M i c r o s o f t O f f i c e P e r f o r m a n c e P o i n t S e r v e r 2 0 0 7
Microsoft??™s goal for PerformancePoint Server was for a unified product that would
allow businesses to monitor the business, analyze the data, and plan for the future;
plans could then be compared against actuals in the new year as well as performance
monitored??”thus completing the circle.
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