Is Microsoft Getting out of BI?

According to this article, those of you who are placing BI bets in the Microsoft camp could find that things are getting tough.

"Citing the recession and cutbacks in travel budgets, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) has canceled this year's October Microsoft BI Conference, according to a posting on the company's Web site blog."

The conference will now be held every other year, with the next conference scheduled for October 2010. This seemed a bit strange to me since I did attend the Gartner BI conference held nearby a month or so ago, and it seemed well attended. Moreover, interest in BI seems to be increasing, not decreasing. But, perhaps this is just Microsoft, who is actually discontinuing its PerformancePoint BI product.

"Earlier this year, Microsoft said it would discontinue its PerformancePoint business intelligence and performance management software and build the product's dashboard, scorecard and data analysis capabilities into the SharePoint collaboration platform. Microsoft is scheduled to release a third and final service pack for PerformancePoint around midyear."

The larger issue is that I just don't see Microsoft as a player in the world of BI, beyond their database presence, which is significant. Like many of the Microsoft moves into core enterprise systems, they don't seem to follow through, with many enterprise products out there, then not. Thus, many buying BI technologies just won't consider Microsoft on the face of it. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft makes money by selling a million of something...operating systems, databases, xBoxs, etc., and when you look at strategic enterprise technology, such as BI, those numbers are not there unless you're pulling in another commodity product. I suspect that BI is not pulling in the number of databases they expected to sell around BI, and thus BI becomes less interesting to Microsoft. Or, should I say became less interesting to Microsoft. We'll see.