Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference – Day 1
Posted Monday, October 6th, 2008
Okay, once you get past the fact that the opening keynote by Stephen Elop was preceded by 80′s cover tunes played (loudly and early and before I had enough caffeine) by "The Dudley Manlove Quartet" (who had 5 members), the keynotes were definitely worth the wait.
The key (no pun intended) points:
1. MS wants to "democratize" BI.
In essence, put easy to use tools, built in Excel, into the hands of the end user. Then allow them to use those tools to build stuff that the rest of the organization can share through MOSS. This "self service" BI is nicknamed Project Gemini and will start appearing in staged feature pack releases (I think that’s what they said).
The most astonishing thing I saw was one of the program managers, working from a $1,000 workstation using Excel 2007 with the Gemini plug-in, pull in a data set of 20,000,000 rows (that’s right, 20 million rows), and dynamically build a pivot table whose dimensional relationships were created on the fly, upload the table to MOSS and, while doing so, dynamically create an Analysis Cube that everyone else could share. And he did in in 20 seconds. Almost any Excel knowledgeable accountant I know could do what he did if they had this loaded.
2. SQL 2008 is totally, totally cool.
You will now hear it here first: I am leaving my wife for SQL 2008. MS just set a data loading record of 30 minutes for 1TB of data. This is a world record for a wintel platform and beats Oracle by 15 minutes. Combine that with its ability to scale massively up (they were doing demos with 150TB of data where reports were kicking out in 4 or 5 seconds) and still meet the needs of the SMB space, and SQL2008 is definitely a hotty.
The rest of the day was a plethora of preso’s on KPI’s and Dashboards in MOSS and Performance Point, combined with great session on using Excel and Excel Services to deploy good, solid BI solutions inexpensively (both on initial investment and TCO).
It appears IBIS is leading the pack in BI for the SMB space with our fixed fee offerings around Analysis Services and Excel, and especially in our work with deploying dashboards deployed in MOSS via Excel Services.
One last note: MS has to learn not to let the marketing department try to make humorous Powerpoint preso’s for technical staff. MS is a lot of things, but as a humorist, they really, really suck.
More tomorrow. If you want intra-day updates, check out my twitter feed at http://twitter.com/DwightSpecht.
Dwight
Tags: BI, MOSS, Performance Point
Posted in Business Intelligence, Reporting
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