With touch-computing growing in relevance as part of the general tendency to adopt natural user interfaces (NUI), Microsoft's Business Intelligence solutions could not have been left out of the equation. At the company's recent Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle, a marriage of Microsoft Surface and BI was demonstrated on stage. You will find the video demo featuring Kristina Kerr, Senior Manager in Microsoft BI, and Kurt DelBenes, Senior Vice President, Office Business Platform Group, embedded at the bottom of this article.

“The coolest BI demo in the history of BI demos, this 'behind the scenes' clip of the BI surface demo at this year’s Microsoft BI conference in Seattle puts new meaning to the term data visualization. Although this technology is somewhat futuristic you can quickly begin to see the value and intuitiveness of combining data in a highly visual and interactive context,” revealed a member of the Microsoft BI team.

Introduced at the start of 2007, it took a while for Microsoft Surface to become available. As of 2008, businesses can acquire the Redmond giant's tabletop computer for prices ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. Of course that Surface has to be tailored to specific business needs and, in this context, the BI demonstration is an illustrative example of how the product can be adapted to various organizations.

But at the same time, Microsoft is doing so much more for its Business Intelligence platform than integrate it with Surface. The true evolution comes from the modifications planned under-the-hood, and not necessary from BI solutions with natural user interfaces.

“We saw business intelligence delivered through a single integrated environment where people can simultaneously communicate, collaborate, analyze and search, bringing all of those pieces together, planning and forecasting in Excel, communication within the portal, a personalized dashboard, parameterized search using Virtual Earth and bringing all of those pieces together. Behind the scenes, SQL, Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel - all of those things working together, all very familiar to our end users, therefore supporting our goal of democratization,” explained Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division, at the end of his address during the Microsoft BI Conference.