Craig Schiff has an interesting post on the plans underway at Hyperion. It seems that they are adding 50 consolidation customers and 100 planning customers a quarter and have a marketing strategy based around "best of breed".

I wonder how well this will hold up over the coming year with Microsoft wading into the arena with PerformancePoint?

With thanks to Yuri who pointed me in the direction of Craig who has pointers to a whole range of materials around the performance management shake up that is going on.

Craig has a short piece on Performance Management 2.0 which he describes as an outgrowth of the core performance management that many companies have in place.

The 2.0 tag will become truer as the Microsoft PerformancePoint impact becomes clearer. In Craig’s words;

The area with the greatest potential payback is operational analytics. This really brings performance management to all areas of the company and makes it meaningful and relevant to each of those areas.

The emphasis is mine but I think that it shows how the Microsoft mentality of "pile them high sell them cheap" and get the information in front of those that can act on it will drive the market going forward. 

It is also interesting to see how the likes of Business Objects are starting to align their portfolio of products to ensure that they maintain the same level of coverage as Microsoft are expected to offer.

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

I liked this post and some of the points it made. It has also triggered me to get the book being quoted.

I did like this point:

The paradox of choice is a relatively simple concept – when presented with too many options, we are more likely to choose nothing at all. Doh! Barry Schwartz has written a whole book about this concept (guess what the title is!).

Well worth a read.

I have been fighting a strange bug in an Integration I have got between Oracle 9i running on a Solaris box and SQL Server 2005.

• Within the dev environment the SSIS imports run just fine.
• When packaged and deployed to SQL Server they run just fine.
• When run from SQL Server Agent scheduled they run just fine.
• When run from SQL Server Agent scheduled and no one is interactivly  logged in to Windows on to the SQL box the import fails with an unspecified error.

The SQL Agent is running as a domain account with network access to the Oracle Box the job is set to run using that account and when I log in (allowing the job to run) I am logging is as a NON domain account!

It seems really weird but this post was triggered by reading this post by Jamie. Maybe, just Maybe!

Ian Tien points out that Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 will have the usual Microsoft snappy title and will be released Summer 2007.

I have not fully explored the links as the connection I am on is Very slow.

If you are after a closer view of some screen shots I see that the source presentation from the announcement is now available. I think that the screens on the Biz# management console dont do it justice.

Picked up this useful tit bit

Those who are trying to integrate Ax 3.0 clients with BizTalk Server 2006 and Analysis Server 2005, please note that at the time of writing this may not be possible.

Particularly with Analysis Server 2005 (AS 2005), the problem seems to stem from the fact that whereas by default AS 2006 has moved away from DSO (Decision Support Objects), Ax 3.0 is basically a DSO enabled program. Though (to some extent) Ax 3.0 is able to speak to AS 2005 using the backward compatibility feature of AS, subsequently when you try to view the cube inside Ax 3.0 it falls through.

As Touchstone do a fair bit of Axapta work this could have bitten us.

This blog here has a posting speculating that there is to be a Microsoft BI conference in the Summer. Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence of this. I would love it to be true and hope that there is sufficient notice so I can start pestering my boss!

Well day three is over and I did get a lot out of it.

The PerformancePoint bits were great to see and I am looking forward to getting my hands on it. However, I do think that having seen the current gulf between the MS components and the ProClarity ones in terms of integration that the team will have their work cut out.

The Business Scorecard Manager day was a good refresh from the training course I did on it. It is a nice tool but I still think the Builder app could do with a lot of usability studies. It seems a bit disjointed at the moment. I am assured that the V2 product is much tidier.

I really enjoyed getting into Proclarity. I had always meant to get it installed and have a go but never did. I now consider it a must have. Even if it is just as a powerful cube browser and MDX generator. I shall certainly be including it in my demo stack.

It was also nice that there was a 2 way dialogue and Ryan Buma ( Microsoft’s director of business development for Office business applications) seemed to take onboard some of the points that were made. Namely:

• Microsoft need to get the BSM, Proclarity, PerformancePoint, Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and SQL Server teams locked together in a padded room with a senior exec who should be armed with a large LART. They should then decide and CLEARLY state what the message is on KPIs. There is way too much confusion about what tools fit where.
• When the teams are allowed out they should then be locked up with the Dynamics teams. It is the Dynamics product lines that will be driving the lions share of sales of the MS BI products. So get it together and make it work together. This will be even more imperative when PerformancePoint comes out. In fairness Ryan did say they were working on it but that it was hard. We know its hard!

Anyway my thanks to Ryan, Bruce Alpert, Jan Van Dijk, Andrew Sadler, Danielle and the rest of the team for a well worth will 3 days. Enjoy Munich!

and its huge!

I am doing the Microsoft Partner BI Bootcamp and yesterday was the first day.

Amongst many things that we were shown was the new Biz# Performance Management tool. In the past I have seen screenshots and I have considered it to be only a holder and management tool for cubes.

My assumptions were very wrong. There was so much more to it that I missed some of the points but what I did get was that it is a full blown performance management tool.

In this tool you define dimensions and cubes (called models) as one would expect. You can also define security as one would expect. What I did not expect is the ability to define complex consolidation processes, business rules and workflow.

There is the ability to model large complex companies with multiple currencies, multiple reporting rules and consolidation rules.

It is possible to establish a master definition of the whole process and then use this as a template for subsiduries. In this way global models can be defined and local additions made.

In order to define the rules there is a new rule language. The idea of this is that business analysts can define rules without needing to know MDX or TSQL. You define the rule using this syntax and this is then translated into MDX or TSQL as appropriate. When I first heard this I groaned thinking that I would need to learn another new language, but, I think that the syntax is nice and simple. The problem I can see is that there is a danger that this approach as the result might be too intimidating for some and too simplistic to deal with the more complex processes. I dont know it will need to be properly understood and I didnt get that yet.

The Biz# Component also manages the performance gathering operations. This includes the forms which are written and completed in Excel. There is a workflow engine included in PerformancePoint but because of the different release cycles at Microsoft this is not currently the Windows Workflow or Sharepoint workflow. This may change in the future.

There are so many nice bits already visible in the application, for example if a forecast is made on the basis of a formula then that formula is recorded as well as the resulting forecast value. It is also possible to define how parent forecasts can be distributed through children. (It was spotted by an eagle eyed atendee that this was not quite right as sometimes the sum of the children did not quite add up to the parent. This may have beed a rounding error but it was not clear).

Once you have defined the models you deploy them to a server. From then on there is multy users editing with check in and out. The deploy process can create all the cubes and associated Analysis Services functionality. It will also build a staging database to support the cubes and simplify the data imports required.

Overall this is going to be a stunning suite in the Performance Management space. I can see that THE skill to have in the future is going to be Business Analysis and Performance Point and Microsoft are setting up a partner specalisation and exams to support this. When you see the scope and scale of the product and then include the Business Scorecard and Proclarity suites as well then there is a strong product which would do well on its own. Throw in the aggressive pricing strategy Microsoft are intending and it will be a winner.

The road map is that the Biz# Performance modeling tool will be in Beta on 11th November. (The BSM and Proclarity are of course out already). The pricing will be announced in Q1 2007 and the full integrated product should be RTM in June 2007. (NB These dates are as currently standing and may be subject to change …. etc etc)

One final thing that I have noticed. The positioning of Reporting Services seems to be moving. It is now being shown as further down the stack – moving more into the back office side with SQL RDMS and less in the user tools space. From the perspective of PerformancePoint it seems that Proclarity will be the dominant reporting tool. Reporting Services is more targeted at Line of business reporting .

Onward to todays sessions.