Finally Microsoft announced plan on Business Planning and Consolidation product line, this time it is not PerformancePoint Server or SharePoint. Microsoft is joining hands with SAP BusinessObjects for Planning, budgeting, forecasting and Consolidations applications.

SAP has taken an aggressive stance that its business planning and consolidation product from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio can be used by all firms, not just SAP customers," said John Hagerty, vice president and research fellow at AMR Research.

"The application takes advantage of the latest available versions of Microsoft Office 2007, including integration with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, enabling customers to use the familiar tools they work with every day while benefiting from the features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database and SQL Server AnalysisServices."

To provide the most value, and to help customers face the reality of operating in an increasingly complex and globalized world,the application also comes with an International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) starter kit. The kit contains pre-built patented process flows to guide users through the consolidation process and generate consolidated financial statements. Other content, such as charts of accounts and input schedules, is available to help facilitate the transition to IFRS.

In addition to management and legal consolidation capabilities, the application streamlines planning, budgeting and forecasting by supporting top-down and bottom-up planning, which leads to timely, more accurate plans that are aligned with strategic goals. It also helps facilitate collaborative planning across all functions for more accurate budgeting, and enables continuous planning and rolling forecasts to meet rapidly changing business conditions and reduce budget cycle time.

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1. What is the good news about SQL Server 2008 R2 ?
Addition of Datacenter and Parallel Data Warehouse Editions, StreamInsight, PowerPivot Self-Service Business Intelligence, In-memory analysis, Support for Windows Server Hyper-V, Azure Cloud operating system, Master Data Services, Report Builder, Microsoft can better position itself to competitors like IBM, Oracle and Teradata.

2. So what is the bad news ?
SQL Server is the center piece of Microsoft products like SharePoint, Exchange (kind of), Cloud Computing, Asp.net and all. So Microsoft is keep adding more features and bulking up the products. Every version comes with more new editions and additions.

Other vendors like IBM, Oracle, Teradata, SAP, MicroStrategy are providing studio (complete suite of tools) to takle Business Intelligence, Dashboarding, Scorecarding and Enterprise Performance Management platforms.

Even if you own Datacenter version or Enterprise version of SQL Server, you still need to have Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Windows Server, Visual Studio, Business Intelligence Development Studio, PerformancePoint Server (discontinued) to handle Presentation, Workflow, Data entry forms, Data Modeling, Multi-Dimensional cubes (OLAP) and more.

3. How is the competitors are stacked up ?
IBM recent purchase of Cognos for BI, TM1 for Planning, SPSS for Predictive Anlaysis, Cognos Express for midsize, Datastage, DB2, AIX platforms makes it better one-stop solution provider for enterprise.

Recent announcements on Cloud computing strategy makes IBM as a BI / EPM Solution provider rather than just one part of the solution provider.

Oracle products like Essbase, Hyperion Planning, Integration with RDBMS, Master Data Management, Dashboarding, EPM Workspace, OBIEE and wide range products makes Oracle well fit in this arena.

SAP is trying to convince its business community with Business Objects acquisitions and partnering with Terdata and SAS Institute. BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence (why do you name so big ?), SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation , SAP BusinessObjects Edge Strategy Management are well suited for SAP business community, yet to be seen how well it works together with mixed environment or non SAP shops.

Microstra tegy just released free starter edition for BI and dashboarding beginners, and making more in-roads.

Teradata is ahead in cloud computing BI strategy by providing tools to work in Amazon Elastic cloud (EC2)and VMWare Virualized environments.

4. Top 10 things Microsoft can do to get more marketshare ?
- Package the tools (suite or studio) needed to tackle BI, EPM, Master Data Management
- Build Examples, Models and better educate the community and get feedback
- Put a roadmap for Cloud computing using Microsoft Tools BI & Performance management
- Simplify the licensing options and cost
- Provide Suite of tools for Small & Mid-size, while continue targeting Enterprise business
- Clear distinction between different Editions
- Zero-footprint installation for BI / EPM modeling and reporting
- Integrate Silverlight into the tools
- Build everything around Excel
- Simplify the strategy

5. Some of the Challenges and Risk ?
- How do you take the features from SharePoint (Workflow, Dashboarding), InfoPath (Data Entry Forms), Report Builder and put these features in to Business Intelligence Studio ?
- How to provide all these features without having thick downloadable client ?
- Studio which targets the small-midsize business while providing flexibility to enterprise developers ?
- What is Cloud Computing strategy in BI, Performance Management, Master Data Management ?

New Premium Editions
SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse

Hightlights
PowerPivot Self-Service Business Intelligence
- SQL Server PowerPivot Add-in for Excel(formerly known as "Gemini)
- SharePoint 2010 based Operations Dashboard
- SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0

PowerPivot Facebook Home

Master Data Management (MDM)

Take advantage of Data Source Views to integrate data from across the enterprise based on a Unified Dimension Model that consolidates data from heterogeneous, enterprise-wide data stores such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and Teradata. The UDM creates a holistic view of the business, helping end users gain enterprise-wide insight.

The Microsoft MDM solution will be built upon the solid foundations of Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Windows Communication Foundation, the ADO.Net Entity Data Model (EDM), Integration Services, BizTalk Server, and other key Microsoft technologies.

- SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services

StreamInsight
The ability to monitor, analyze and act on the data in motion provides significant opportunity to make more informed business decisions in near real-time. StreamInsight Blog

Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Via Infoworld

Microsoft site

PowerPivot for Excel is designed to allow end users to work with large amounts of data, aggregate from different sources and create what is essentially a Microsoft Excel file. The users can then share the information through SharePoint.

A big part of this improved scalability and performance comes from the product's massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, which allows queries to be distributed across multiple threads, rather than single threads.