Microsoft's Performance Management Gambit

Microsoft made a major announcement earlier this week concerning its business intelligence/performance management offering.  I'd recommend taking a look at "Microsoft's Performance Management Powerplay" in the Enterprise Systems Journal for a good overview of the offering.

The product, PerformancePoint, is scheduled to be released next year.  It will combine the next version of Business Scorecard Manager (see my last blog entry), with ProClarity, a recently purchased data visualization product and Biz# (BizSharp).

This last piece is the most newsworthy.  Biz# is  planning, budgeting, and forecasting system that is closely integrated with Excel.  Line managers receive spreadsheets that contain financial history and high level goals and can add a forecast for their group.  This forecast is then integrated with others to produce a consolidated company forecast.  Biz# provides the development environment and the language to design and build these planning and forecasting modules.

This product line is not new, but it is new for Microsoft.  It adds a significant piece to their performance management offerings.  It also fits well with their strategy to make Excel, and other Office tools, the user interface to an organization's back end systems.  This accomplishes three important and related goals for Microsoft:

1. Locking users into Office and keeping them away from less expensive, competitive products.
2. Providing a compelling reason for customers, especially large enterprises, to upgrade to the latest Office version.
3. Extending the reach of the Microsoft stack (product line) by building stronger links between server products (SQL Server and SharePoint) and client products (Excel).

While the beta will not be released until the Fall, this is still an important product announcement for Microsoft and for all of its medium to large ($50 million in revenue and up) sized customers.  It provides these customers with another reason to consider a Microsoft-based business intelligence strategy in the near term.  PerformancePoint provides strong evidence of Microsoft's commitment to this product line.

At KMA, we will stay on top of this new product as we continue to grow our experience and expertise with SQL Server 2005, SharePoint, Office automation, and Business Scorecard Manager.  We will continue to work with our customers to build business intelligence and performance management systems that will provide significant business benefits in the short-term and while positioning them to move to PerformancePoint, if and when it is appropriate.