Microsoft Invested Strongly into Business Intelligence in 2010

When it was starting to unveil the first details about its latest version of the data platform, Microsoft underlined a strong focus on providing enhanced business intelligence capabilities and features to enterprise customers.

Looking back on 2010, Pej Javaheri, Group Product Manager, Business Intelligence Microsoft reveals that the Redmond company invested strongly into BI in a range of its products, starting with Excel 2010, SharePoint 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2.

Javaheri emphasized the introduction of maps for SQL Server 2008 R2’s Reporting Services, mapping visualization functionality enhancements for the data platform, as well as the delivery of Report Parts in Report Builder 3.0.

However, BI enhancements have been offered to customers running additional products from Microsoft, not just SQL Server 2008 R2. It is the case of the PerformancePoint Services available in SharePoint Server 2010, but also of Visio Services.

“A SharePoint service, PPS gains the scalability and reliability of SharePoint, while enabling rich new business intelligence applications and deployments. Let your scorecards and dashboards roll,” Javaheri noted.

“Visio Services – sometimes overlooked, Visio provides a wealth of visualizations and diagram ability that is unique to business intelligence. With Visio Services, you can share your Visio diagrams on the web, with the same fidelity as the client, without needing the client.”

Customers running Office 2010 can also take advantage of the PowerPivot free add-in designed to integrate seamlessly into Excel 2010.

The tool is designed to simplify data analysis while bridging Excel 2010 with SharePoint Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.

“At PASS we introduced our new BISM (BI Semantic Model) capabilities. This is PowerPivot on steroids. Everything you love about PowerPivot beefed up, inside of Visual Studio, full set of capabilities and a rich new semantic model providing your users with a single source of metadata for their BI goodness.

“SQL Server Analysis Services in “Denali” is going to change the way you think of OLAP, Models, and Semantic layers,” Javaheri added.

In this regard, the software giant appears to be committed to the future evolution of BI in its products, and especially in its data platform.

This is obvious, especially if you look at technologies such as SQL Server Codenamed "Denali."

SQL Server Codenamed "Denali" CTP1 is available for download as of the first week of November 2010, offering improvements such as Project code-name “Crescent”, a web-based data exploration and visualization solution.

Microsoft SQL Server code-named 'Denali' - Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) is available for download here.