Microsoft: BI Economics 'Out of Whack'

When Microsoft speaks, people listen. When Microsoft enters a market, people run.

That's the way it's been the past decade and a half, and that certainly has been the case with business intelligence in recent years. I remember speaking with BI vendors around the turn of the century (sounds odd, doesn't it?), who were nervously watching and waiting for the software giant to come in and destroy the low-end market with its commodity priced OLAP Services.

Now, Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft business division, reportedly did some more saber rattling at the software giant's first business intelligence conference, as reported here.

Raikes said that enterprises are paying too much for BI and getting too little -- traditional BI software is costly, complex and difficult to maintain. Microsoft's strategy is to "change the economics of BI."

"We are revolutionaries in the economics of BI by making broad deployment possible through a low per-user price point and by dramatically improving ease of use. Microsoft will bring BI capabilities to 10 times the number of workers. We'll be able to do that because we deliver business intelligence exactly where the information workers work every day, in the applications and tools that they already know."

Increase the reach of BI to more the 10 times the number of workers? You mean, "democratize" BI?

Microsoft may be on to something here. In my work with Unisphere Research, A few months back, I helped develop and author a survey of 356 members of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) which confirmed that the vision of extending BI tools across the enterprise has not happened yet. For the most part, only one out of 10 employees in a typical enterprise has access to BI capabilities. A follow-up study by OAUG also found that in a majority of companies, fewer than 10 percent of end-users can currently author their own reports, dashboards, scorecards, analysis, ad hoc queries, and planning models.

Jim Kobielus, principal analyst with Current Analysis, was quoted in the same article, observing that with upgrades to PerformancePoint Server (scheduled for release in late summer 20070, Microsoft "has a clear BI and CPM story to tell and proof that they're aggressively executing on it." This plays well into the evolution of BI into the Corporate Performance Management space as well.

Microsoft is also showing it means business with BI by teaming up with some big system integrators, such as Accenture, Capgemini and TCS (formerly known as Tata).

And, of course, we all know that Microsoft dominates the low end of business intelligence where many folks are still seemingly happily stuck -- Excel.

UPDATE: More details on Microsoft's unfolding "Pervasive BI" strategy can be found here.