Microsoft BI gets poorer

At the end of January Microsoft announced the demise of PerformancePoint Server 2007, pulling the product a mere fifteen months after its London launch. This is an extraordinary end for an application vaunted as providing "end-to-end Business Intelligence" and heralding "a new day for BI".

PerformancePoint Server (PPS) integrated into a single application the planning, analysis and monitoring processes, providing joined-up performance management tools including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation.

Described as an integral part of Microsoft’s overall BI proposition it sounded great: PPS "enables you to drive greater business advantage by providing performance management insights to all employees. Cost effective and easy to deploy, it empowers you to make better business decisions with confidence." As it turns out, PPS wasn’t as integral as all that and now it's in bits, some to be swept under the carpet.

Some of its capabilities are to be incorporated into SharePoint Server Enterprise: Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft Office Business Platform Group, said "Based on customer feedback, we have decided to consolidate the scorecard, dashboard and analytical capabilities from Office PerformancePoint Server into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise and rebrand them as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint".

I’d genuinely love to know which customers offered this feedback; I’d guess not the ones using the planning functionality. The planning element of PPS was always the weak link: it was a new application with all the usual drawbacks of a product in version 1.0. Microsoft has a track record of ploughing on with products that don’t quite hit the mark first time and developing them into excellent workhorses: XP turned into a robust operating system after a shaky start, and SQL Server is now a solid product despite its earliest incarnations being best forgotten. So early adopters of PPS can be forgiven for thinking that the product would be nurtured into a reliable form.

Of small comfort to users of PPS is Microsoft’s pious statement "Customer care is our primary focus during this transition". Microsoft is pursuing its own goals and is undoubtedly focusing on profits in these straitened times (the PPS announcement came at the same time as one about job cuts).

How about some care-full compensation for those customers who spent time learning a technology that was ultimately a dead end? It must be great to develop new applications at the very top level, sitting in high-powered meetings and deciding the future direction of products or that the time is right to launch a whole new all-embracing BI product on the unsuspecting public.
Then when things go wrong, it’s back into a meeting, pull the plug and get someone to write some form of words to placate the people whose business strategy has just gone down the pan.

Customer care? Really? The termination of PerformancePoint Server gives out a message to the BI world which could easily be characterised as Microsoft having given up on BI, gone off the boil, lost its way…

I spoke to David Hobbs-Mallyon, SQL Server and BI Product Manager at Microsoft in the UK, and asked him to comment on this apparent loss of direction. David said that it was certainly not the case that Microsoft had lost interest in BI; indeed the company is still is as committed to 'BI for the masses' as ever and sees this rationalisation as part of the process of delivering BI to everyone's desk.

Another victim in this debacle is the excellent multi-dimensional data analysis tool, ProClarity. This well planned and well developed product was bought by Microsoft and, instead of continuing to sell it, Microsoft saw fit to incorporate its functionality into, you guessed it, PerformancePoint Server.

The final ignominy is that we are now told that "The core ProClarity capabilities that made that product successful will migrate to SharePoint and Excel over the coming releases".

Excel will be the only thick client option. Fine. But how are we supposed to visualise our multi dimensional data in the interim?

Followers of this column may have noticed that I have never written about PerformancePoint in the BI column. I'd love to tell you that I somehow saw this coming, but I didn't at all. It was just that I was never sure where the product was going.

I was even asked by Microsoft to write a book about PPS but due to a resounding lack of enthusiasm on both sides the project never left the drawing board. Perhaps that lack of enthusiasm should have told me more than it did at the time. Microsoft will, I guess, say that it is simply a company that makes products. It doesn't force people to use them, nor does it force people to bet their business strategy on those products.

All of which is perfectly true. Microsoft is not the evil empire, it is simply a company that needs to provide a profitable balance sheet for its stockholders. It keeps profitable products and drops unprofitable ones.

But there is more to this. BI is not simple. You don’t simply start 'doing' BI one day in your company. It takes time to plan and deploy a coherent BI solution. In order to do that, you need to work with tools from a company that has a history of both innovation and dependency.

For the last ten years I have been able to tell people that I honestly believe that Microsoft has a good, consistent, well thought out strategy for BI. Would you believe me if I told you that now?