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PerformancePoint Server really is a new animal in the Microsoft Zoo (Official Launch September 19th 2007). The competive positioning among Hyperion, Cognos or Business Obejects (Cartesis) suggests that deep knowledge of subjects like financial planning or statutory consolidation will be necessary beside all the technical knowledge needed to build the models and user interfaces. The technical knowledge needed is vast - the components involved beside PerformancePoint Server are SQL Server along with its Analysis Services and Integration Services components, Excel and SharePoint. And so many Microsoft partners who have implemented infrastructure solutions or data-warehouses with a technical approach up to now, have started to embark on the PerformancePoint journey ramping up their technical skills.
Adrian Downs of B(iQ) asks the question about specific certifications on PerformancePoint for Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) which I think is a good idea. Given the mostly technical background of most Microsoft partners today I think there will have to be a hell of a lot of Controlling, Accounting and Business knowledge packed into those certifications.

A new day for BI - but also one for Microsoft. And an excellent opportunity for those Microsoft partners who talk the talk and walk the walk in Performance Management.
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Business Intelligence
Corporate Performance Management
Microsoft

After some efforts to build its own MDM offering Microsoft has taken a buy decision now: Microsoft just announced the takeover of Stratature, a US based software vendor that is completely focused on Master Data Management. Another move to beef up the BI stack to enable enterprise wide CPM application architectures.
Jamie Thomson at Conchango has some more details.

Ten years ago, when Microsoft bought Panorama to enter the Business Intelligence market space, many thought that Microsoft would instantly dominate the arena. It has taken a little longer but here they are ten years later Microsoft is a long term player and Steve Ballmer has made it clear in his key note speech at the first ever Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle at the beginning of May. We are dead serious he said. Full Article

Young companies need to focus on strategy and on growing their business. That’s why it is important to properly investigate before you choose a new brand or company name and register it. But even if you do you can never be sure no one will dispute your right to use it. We decided not to use our money and energy on such a dispute when another company claimed its exlusive right to use the letters “cp”

Before:

After:

What’s really important though is that we are growing like hell and that we are having fun doing it.

cpOne AG - a new provider of Performance Management and Business Intelligence Solutions, announced its market debut the day before yesterday. The company, uniting Axus AG in Munich and Aveness GmbH in Vienna with many�industry experts joining from other CPM vendors, plans to expand business activities into other European markets during 2007.�Most of the�management are ex MIS executives - including myself. So check it out: http://www.cpone.net�(for now the site is in German only - but the English version will be available shortly)

For years it seemed specialist vendors of point solutions for planning, budgeting or statutory consolidation had found the ideal habitat to grow endlessly. Their strongest competitors were enormous Excel sheets that travelled the world via mail and none of the global software giants seemed able or willing to enter this market. Microsoft’s determination to change this fact for the business intelligence arena has shown in earlier developments around the BI platform of SQL Server and Analysis Services. Real corporate performance management however with all the bells and whistles such as feedback loops, process support for budgeting, forecasting or consolidation were really hard to implement on the Microsoft platform unless you chose a third party product based on SQL Server from vendors such as Outlooksoft, Panorama or Winterheller (strong in Germany and Austria). With PerformancePoint Server 2007, which should be available for public beta by November this year and is expected to be released in Q2 2007, Microsoft will once again change the shape of the whole marketplace in CPM. Microsoft Partners such as Outlooksoft, Panorama, MIS/Infor or Winterheller who have depended on Microsofts platform are now facing Microsoft as a powerful competitor.

Here are some reasons why I think PerformancePoint server will have such a big impact on the market:

• Microsoft Excel 2007 is tightly integrated as a front-end
• As is Sharepoint Portal
• SQL Server and Analysis Services serve as the backend infrastructure and thus become the core of the Microsoft CPM architecture

The business functionality covered include and can be expanded by VAR’s or MSP’s

• Budgeting
• Financial Planning
• Forecasing
• Management Consolidation
• Analysis (ProClarity product set)
• Scorecarding (Business Scorecard Manager)

The most important reason of all are the thousands of Microsoft Dynamics Partner globally who have lots of business and finance knowledge and sure are waiting to expand their business towards CPM. CPM is mainstream now!

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Business Intelligence
Corporate Performance Management
Microsoft

Today Microsoft has announced the takeover of ProClarity…It has paid for ProClarity to focus their great dashboard and visualization suite exclusively on Microfoft BI technology. And Microsoft have proven once again, that they take their corporate performance management (CPM) mission seriously and complemented to their analytic offering. Now we are waiting to do business modelling, planning, forecasting and risk management with Microsoft Technology. Are the expectations for Biz# (Biz Sharp) too high? Or will Microsoft continue to acquire IPR - maybe Outlooksoft?

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Business Intelligence
Corporate Performance Management
Microsoft
Reporting

• Find out what strategic objectives the system will help to achieve
• Secure (constant) Top Management attention and support
• Define what success looks like
• Gain user acceptance for the chosen platform and approach and as early as possible
• Make sure the internal team is free to engage within the project
• Make sure you have an experienced project manager on board who understands both, technology and business issues
• Avoid having sales people drive your product, architecture and system integrator selection process - one way to achieve this, is to use an independent external consultant to drive this process - make him dependent on project success
• Gather functional requirements from users and management and shrink them to a level that makes sense
• Have process and functional specifications signed off by stakeholders while managing expectations - both are likely to evolve throughout the project
• Use the Project to simplify business processes
• Combine the above with an open technologically sound platform architecture that enables the end - user to interact flexibly with it
• Obey the finance end-users’ wish to use Excel as a front - end, but force them to work with centralised data and metadata
• Constantly review alignment of delivery with strategy and business processes
• Refine and change even structural and functional details within strategy and architecture throughout the project – Experience has shown many times: People, internal and external project members and sponsors gain crucial knowledge in the course of the project, which is important to utilise
• Follow a very stringent change management
• Work in incremental steps: Create many ‘Quick Wins’ and celebrate their completion
• Communicate, communicate, communicate: Plans, timelines, changes, successes, failures, challenges…- and make stakeholders contribute
• Exercise time, delivery and budget pressure on the project team

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Business Intelligence
Corporate Performance Management
Project Management

Microsoft is launching the long awaited SQL Server 2005 along with all the new schnick schnack BI components. The launch tour started on 7th November in San Francisco and goes around the world within the next two months. The fact that the product itself is not available yet is a minor imperfection considering that hundreds of “friendly customer implementations” worldwide have already taken place throughout 2005.
While everyone seems to recognise the new BI features, market experts seem to focus their contemplation around SQL Servers competitiveness versus the other OLTP/RDMBS players and the lethargy of SQL 2000 shops in replacing a working system (See Stephen Swoyer’s article on tdwi.org).
I believe the new BI components will have a far more changing effect on the market of established BI/CPM players such as Business Objects, Cognos or Hyperion than on the OLTP/RDBMS market.
The suite is quite complete and slashes the licence prices to a level where even the carpentry of the town with 25 employees can afford a proper Reporting System, Scorecard or Data Mining that until now was limited to very large organisations. The market gets bigger and the established players who can no longer hide in their cosy niche market are in urgent need of some creative brain stormings…

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Business Intelligence
Business Objects
Hyperion
Cognos
Microsoft
Reporting

Considering that Microsoft is eager to win the battle around the business intelligence and reporting market against Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, BO’s recent announcement to acquire Infomersion comes as a surprise (I would have guessed Microsoft will…). Infomersion are the authors of a flash-based quite smart report-visualitzation tool called XCELSIUS which nicely fits into the MS BI architecture, is very simple to handle and delivers highly professional dynamic reports, which among many other methods can be delivered via web or dynamically integrated into Power Point presentations. According to Microsoft sources XCELSIUS is even being used quite extensively for internal purposes at Microsoft.
Strategically it could definitely have been a good move to snap this relatively small company from it’s competitors…

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Business Intelligence
Business Objects
Microsoft
Reporting

As PALO seems follow the exactly same concept as Applix TM/1 and MIS ALEA, it will be interesting to see what this does to their respective product strategies and pricing. MIS focuses much more on Applications, so Applix will be more vulnerable in this respect. This is only relevant of course if PALO performance rocks!

Jedox, the authors of Worksheet Server have released their first version of a new open source OLAP Server called Palo. Check it out!

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OLAP
Business Intelligence

For years now Microsoft has had a pretty good BI platform around SQL-Server, Analysis Services and DTS. Yet, looking at the poor integration and BI functionality in Office or Sharepoint, it seemed the different groups at Microsoft did not speak to each other a lot. These times seem to be over now. Have a look at Marco Russo ’s account of the first EXCEL 12 (projected release Q4 2006) presentations…Sharepoint 3 seems to promise a much better integration too!

While Yahoogle et al. shape the next revolution in computing and the techies and application designers discuss whether future web applications will replace desktop applications as we know them today (recommended reading via Helge by mail: GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? by Jason Kottke), the reletively small community of Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Performance Management (BPM) vendors still bets on proprietary formats and other protective measures to gain exclusivity within client organisations. Unlike the more innovative web – companies mentioned above the vendors in the BI / BPM segment fail to beat Microsoft partly by not cooperating on standards. For years, while Microsoft was still learning what BI was all about, Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion et al. have not managed to spread their applications to the masses of computer workers who were hungry for valuable information and analysis. Prices and complexity were high and interoperability low. This gave Microsoft the time they needed to define the standards both in terms of formats and interfaces as well as in functionality and performance. What is missing is the sort of innovative power we can see unfolding in an industry, which was formerly known as “a bunch of Search Engines” and today are highly profitable giants who are constantly reinventing themselves. John Doe does not even understand why they are still in business. After all, he is not paying for their services.

Therfore I would be interested to see a similar discussion to the Web 2.0 or YahoogleOS movements in respect to the Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management sector .
After the evolvement of OLAP systems (which were a real technical and functional advancement) and the coining of such important acronyms as BPM or C(orporate)PM (which were Gartner / Meta Group hype – terms for cohesive performance management platforms and processes that never existed in practice (but would be great to have), we could have the “Performance Management 3.0 Discussion”.

So what are the developments that could revolutionize our way to work with BI and BPM apps? Before they will really happen, I believe there will have to be another standardization drive that enables seamless interoperability between platforms, applications and - front ends. Standards, standards, standards. For interfaces, technology, procedures, meta data and what ever else makes sense to standardize. Some of them of course have to be the same standards as for any other application (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI…) and some of them will have to be specific (i.e. IFRS 2.0?). The most revolutionizing standards are yet to be defined I guess.

Will the democratization of information finally happen? Will Knowledge Management, Document Management and Performance Management at last grow together? Will we be able to use any piece of BI / BPM software and ask any question against data from different source systems and get meaningful and consistent results? Or will corporates continue to spend loads of budget on their individual requirements only to discover that the use of the systems is restricted to certain data, processes and people and that any organizational, structural or system changes trigger further effort to keep the system working.

Will we be able to cover the full Performance Management Cycle across disparate transactional systems with best of breed software from different vendors working together with intelligent interfaces? Or will SAP or one of the big BI players outpace the others and make us all happy users of one vendor platforms and themselfes rich?
What is it that will make us arrive at the next level of PMH (Performance Management Happiness)? I’d be interested in your views!

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BPM
Performance Management
Business Intelligence

Just read Lori MacVitie ’s great articele on bizintelligence pipeline via Ted Kemp on the bizintelligence blog. I’d like to suggest that Enterprise Planning/Budgeting and Forecasting processes should be integrated within any BPM environment. The disjointed processes and Excel brouhaha that result out of their exclusion can put the efforts of any BPM project in danger of being wasted…

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BPM
Performance Management

Via infoworld:

Microsoft RFID (radio frequency identification device) package for postal services at a stamp exhibition in Taiwan, hoping to woo the government’s post office and potentially forge a new line of business for the software maker.

The technology Microsoft has on offer here allows a postal service, the package sender, and the receiver to view exactly where the package is at all times. It also notifies a receiver when the package will arrive and alerts senders via MSN Messenger or a mobile phone SMS (Short Message Service) after it has been signed for at its destination.

“Most postal services worldwide are trying to adopt this (type of) technology. Microsoft paid some sponsorship for this show because we’d like to provide this technology to Taiwan’s post office,” said Dragon Shyy, a senior consultant at the Microsoft Technology Center in Taipei.

With SAP and Microsoft in the game RFID seems a safe bet for the next business hype…

Jahrelang hat Hyperion mit seiner IBM Partnerschaft kräftig Kasse gemacht. IBM schloss Enterprise Level Agreements (ELA’s) ab, die vereinfacht gesprochen nur das Volumen und den groben Umfang der Geschäftsbeziehung mit dem Kunden festgelegt hat. Die Key Account Manager mussten dann Anwendungen finden, die sie dann im Rahmen dieser ELA’s den Kunden “reindrücken” konnten.

Im CW Notitzblog fand ich eben die (wohl schon ein paar Wochen alte) Meldung, dass IBM nun selbst auf den Geschmack kommt und eine eigene Business Intelligence Strategie fährt. Mindestens fünf Jahre zu spät. Interessanter Weise ist IBM laut Eigendefinition ja ohnehin schon : “The world’s leading business intelligence solution provider”.Bleibt zu hoffen, dass der Kundennutzen nun mehr in den Vordergrund rückt.

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Business Intelligence
Hyperion
IBM

Carsten Bange von BARC schreibt in der Computerwelt warum SAP BW Implementierungen oft nicht zum gewünschten Ergebins führen - Prädikat lesenswert:

Das “SAP Business Information Warehouse” (SAP BW) gehört zum Business-Intelligence-Portfolio der SAP und ist mittlerweile weit verbreitet. Viele Unternehmen berichten indes von hohen Projektkosten, langen Einführungszeiten und unzufriedenen Anwendern. Schuld daran ist nicht allein die Software, sondern oft liegen die Ursachen in der IT-Strategie, der Projektorganisation sowie in der Art der Implementierung und Nutzung von SAP BW. Im Einzelnen lassen sich elf grundsätzliche Probleme in der Praxis ausmachen, die zum Teil auch in anderen Data-Warehouse-Projekten auftreten können:

Cindi Howson praises the technical developments which are currently being driven by the software vendors in her article on intelligent enterprise. Convergence, i.e. interoperability of software from different vendors, within suites and across orginizational structures is the prevailing topic of her article.

In 2005, we’ve seen the following convergence efforts:

* Business Objects XI brought fuller integration of the Crystal Decisions products the company acquired in 2003.
* Cognos announced that it will bring OLAP and reporting into a common Web architecture with the release of Cognos 8 this fall.
* Hyperion’s Project Avalanche, due later this year, will pull its entire product line onto one platform.
* Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005, due in November, will provide tighter integration between the vendor’s Analysis and Reporting Services

Indeed technology advances have been tremendous over the last few years, even though many BI/CPM deployments fail to be successful. Also a lot of the “convergence” took place within the platforms of the respective vendors to bring together the different technologies following their acquisitions.

One of the main reasons for project failures I see in the fact that companies who endeavor to implement BI solutions are confronted with sales people who are only interested in one thing: Licence revenue. What Cindi Howson fails to emphasize is that the importance of software choice is far less than the industry leads us to believe. The real success factors lie much more in professional preparation, involvement of all stakeholders, proper project management and most of all the right technical architecture which usually involves software from different vendors.

To achieve all of this, the appointment of an experienced and independent external project manager early on in the project could prove supportive. Among other things would be someone who is interested in the success rather than in software revenue, he could act as an “advocatus diaboli” when it comes to usere requirements and he could balance the interest of the different stakeholders. Sometimes IT tend to see projects as a purely technical exercise that has nothing to do with Business requirements while Finance and other more business oriented departments have no idea how to translate their requirements into the language of technical people and do not understand arguements IT would use.

Another way to overcome the “software selection trap” is to find a Business Intelligence System Integrator who has expertise with different technologies, make them support the software selection process and take end to end responsibility for the project success. However a common problem with this approach could be that the SI is not focused enough to entertain a resource pool that is equally skilled in all areas. I would prefer Integrators who focus on two or three software packages who openly discuss strenghts, weaknesses and features versus the requirements and by doing so guide the buyer towards his decision over Integrators who emphasize their complete independence.

Sandy Kemsley also emphazises this point in her Column 2 blog with a slightly different spin and argumentative Gartner support: BPM softskills & BPM, BI and performance management

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BPM
Performance Management
Business Intelligence

DM Review published an interesting article/interview of Michael S. Shiff by William McKnight about the likely developments in Business Intelligence making use of the latest RFID technologies. To me one of the most interesting developments in RFID is the future capability of tags to process information and interact with other tags…Just imagine what that can do for you and your mating efforts

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RFID