14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released to manufacturing an extremely powerful Business Intelligence tool, designed to be used in concert with Excel 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot for Excel 2010 RTM, formerly Project Gemini, was finalized as the Redmond company released SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 to business customers worldwide. The software giant’s perspective is that PowerPivot’s data-analysis capabilities in the context of the computational power it brings to the table will enable businesses to leverage managed self-service BI more and more.
Donald Farmer, principal program manager of the SQL Server Business Intelligence management team, revealed that PowerPivot represented a game-changing piece of technology. In this sense, no longer will IT professionals be needed in order to perform BI analysis and reporting. Such tasks have virtually been democratized with the advent of PowerPivot.
“With the managed self-service BI capabilities in PowerPivot that complement our existing BI technologies, they’ll be able to do such analyses themselves,” Farmer stated. “That means they’ll be able to answer questions more quickly, experiment more and test ‘what-if’ scenarios. Organizations can become more agile. That’s exciting.”
PowerPivot is Farmer’s brainchild, a man who set to simplify BI analysis as much as possible two and a half years ago. In this sense, Farmer even recalled taping customers for input, and discovering that simplicity was, without a doubt, the key to building a successful BI analysis solution.
“First, we had to learn about the specific needs and preferences of end users. We always do extensive user research, but for PowerPivot we had to find a new community of users to work with.” That’s where Farmer’s unusual background proved invaluable. “We spoke with hundreds of customers from a wide range of industries and geographies to try to understand how they would like to be able to use data analytics,” he added. “These customers aren’t IT or BI professionals. Some have never even heard the term ‘business intelligence.’ They speak a different language than we had been used to. But they knew what they wanted.”