Posts Tagged ‘PPS’

On Friday, January 23, Microsoft announced significant changes to its business intelligence strategy.  You can find the detail behind this at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-27KurtDelbeneQA.mspx as well as a number of great blog entries.

To help our customers and partners, I want to summarize those changes then talk about how they will impact you.

Here are the announced changes:

1. Performance Point Monitoring and Analytics will be downgraded into MOSS Enterprise CALS:  This is the part of PPS that handled all dashboarding and KPI’s.  It is the very visual, very sexy part of the product that really helped it sell and also the part that worked the best.  If you own MOSS Enterprise, you now get M&A for free.
2. Performance Point SP3 Release in July/Planning Discontinued:  Planning is the portion of PPS that is the hardest to implement and was intended to replace Forecaster and Enterprise Reporting.  MS will release a performance update service pack (SP3) and then will stop development of new features.  As of July, when SP3 releases, PPS will cease to exist as a stand alone product.
3. Management Reporter To Be Managed by Dynamics:  Management reporter, the FRx replacement reporting tool in PPS, will be given to the Dynamics team to own and enhance.
4. Enterprise Reporting is Back on Support: All previous announcement of Enterprise Reporting’s support discontinuation (planned for Jan 2010) are revoked and its back on the price list.
5. Proclarity Desktop:  Gone.  Not much more comment other than that.

Why did they decide to do this?  Answering solely for myself:

1. The planning module was definitely a v1 release and required significant technical and programming expertise to implement.  However, the Dynamics channel already had good forecasting tools (Forecaster, ER) and wasn’t willing/able to adopt PPS quickly solely for that.  The channel that was adopting it (infrastructure and MOSS partners) weren’t very adept at financial planning and forecasting, so an automatic channel disconnect was setting in.
2. PPS was expensive.  In this environment, it wasn’t going to get good play.  In addition, customers with Enterprise Agreements were feeling "nickled and dimed" over the additional cost in the EA for PPS.
3. MS truly believes in "Democratizing BI", especially in the role Excel and SQL play in this space.  By pushing core BI functionality back into MOSS, Excel and SQL, they allow the widest possible audience to buy and use these features.
4. Lastly, I truly believe someone finally said "Hey, don’t you think the Dynamics team should be working on the finance stuff?".

So, what does this mean to the MS customer?

1. If you own PPS Planning, stick with it, but start looking for a transition in 2012 or thereabouts.
2. If you own PPS  and only use it for M&A, renegotiate your EA when it comes up to lower the cost of it by the PPS piece that got added.  Other than that, you are in the catbird seat.  Good job!
3. If you were looking at PPS for planning, kill the search and talk to your reseller about alternatives.
4. If you were looking at PPS for M&A, continue.  Having it in MOSS Enterprise is great news!
5. If you were looking at Forecaster, FRx, Enterprise Reporting, stop being fearful of the decision.  The products are great and will be supported into the foreseeable future.

As to Management Reporter, we don’t know what’s going to happen to that.  It was billed as the next-gen FRx, but its feature set is, IMHO, pretty crappy still.  I think it will be enhanced significantly by the Dynamics team and become a truly awesome product, but don’t look for short term results.

MS promises it will deliver more roadmap information at 2009 Convergence in New Orleans.  Will have our usual large team there, so we’ll update you after the conference.

Phew…3 days of hardcore BI geekdom come to a close.  The action for today was very representative of the first two days:

Keynotes

Kurt DelBene did a nice job, along with Kristina Kerr, Senor Product Mgr.  Kurt gave a pretty good, but very stock analyst\marketing\can’t-tell-you-anything preso on the future of the BI stack and integration of the office solutions to same.  If you think self-service via Excel and greater integration with MOSS, you think right.  However, Kurt also commented that we are only "halfway through Wave 14", so you won’t see anything for at least another year.

Kristina did a very catchy demo of Microsoft Surface as a BI UI by showing water usage data for the downtown Seattle core, mapped against Visual Earth, against temperature and time.  Very cool, very 3-D.  Not a single customer I work with will ever buy it.  K:  Come up with a self service app that lets me order and pay in a restaurant without talking to a waiter, and I think you may have a winner.

From an overall perspective, the keynotes (with the exception of Ben Stein) were the definite weak point of the conference.  Little solid info, lots of marketing stuff. 

Sessions

The only one I did today was Avoiding Common Mistakes in Analysis Services:  Very nicely done by Craig Utley.  Between his discussion around Attribute Hierarchies and Attribute Relationships, he solved 4 separate problems I have currently with customer deployments.  Also, he has a great book called Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007. 

Vendor Pavilion

Today was the first day I spent time in the Vendor Pavilion and spent the entire time with Robert Sterling, VP of Partner Alliances, at Strategy Companion.  SC is a great vendor of BI plug in solutions for Dynamics CRM and is one of the few that produce a truly powerful and highly integrated solution. 

Hands on Lab

The balance of the day was spent in the HOL working on Performance Point Dashboards, Excel Services\MOSS, and Dynamics AX integration with SSAS.  I think I set a conference record of almost 4 hours in front of the training machines, but was very impressed by the content.

Overall Review

In general, this is a good conference and worth the money, provided you look closely at the conference agenda BEFORE you sign up.  If you’re a client of IBIS and customer of Microsoft, send your CIO or high level tech team combined with at least one SQL Server DBA.  If you are a partner, send an architect and at least on business application (ERP or CRM) consultant.  This year, only I went.  Next year, we’ll probably want to take at least one more person.

Avoid the keynotes.  Split the sessions up to cover maximum ground.  Spend lots of time in the HOL. 

Thanks for reading, folks.