My transition from “Best-of-Breed” BI to MSFT BI and PPS 2007
I hope everyone had a fun and safe holiday break and we are all ready for 2008! As the New Year approaches, I was reflecting on my last few years in the BI space, and I thought it would be interesting to share a little bit of my background in terms of my transition to Microsoft (MSFT) Business Intelligence (BI) in 2007. Below, you will see some vehicle images...dont be alarmed..in order to understand the relevance of these images in a BI blog, please read this entire blog.
Today, when I introduce myself to people acquainted or familiar with the BI and Data Warehousing world, and I say that I work in the BI consulting space, the first question I’m usually asked is “So, you have worked with Micro Strategy, Business Objects, Cognos.” And, my answer is, “Yes, I have worked with MSTR, BOBJ, and Cognos.”
For the past few years, I have mostly worked on the OLAP side with a lot of these BI tools referred to as Best-of-Breed (B-of-B) along with some work with SQL Server (SS) database-embedded and integrated tools part of the MSFT BI stack. Having spent a majority of my time working with B-of-B tools though, and even sold against MSFT BI in many situations, and now in the MSFT BI space, I believe I have an interesting perspective on the BI space.
For most of my career, I have been working as a BI Business Systems Analyst/Strategy Analyst. I have come across a multitude of technologies, but I’ve mostly been in a position which requires focus and understanding of business processes and solving business problems/pains along with an understanding of how Data Warehousing and BI toolsets will be used to solve these problems. For this reason, I have never been really adamant or biased towards any technology, and have always seeked to be a BI professional, irrespective or agnostic of the technology at use.
We all know that any technology, even if it is considered B-of-B, has things it can and cannot do. I once remember a user asking a question in a MicroStrategy 8 (MSTR) training session regarding how do you do “auto filter” in MSTR. I demonstrated that you have to move the column up to a filter area that does something similar to auto filter by doing a page by, and then you can achieve similar functionality. The user still wasn’t pleased. She wanted to easily see auto filter on every column. The only thing I could tell her was that you can easily export it to Excel and do the same. And, she, of course, said, “yeah, I know I can do that in Excel.” Later in the session, the MSTR guy showing a flash-based dashboard demo with moving bubbles did impress some people, but they didn’t really need that.
Anyway, customers, especially the actual users on the business side who are using the BI solutions, have demands. Whether these demands are usability, flexibility, scalability, integration, and/or the ability to simply do things similar to the tools they already have in place, we, as System Integrators (SI’s) have to be focused on meeting these business demands. My transition to MSFT BI has revealed that in our pursuit to meet business requirements, we don't have to overshoot this demand and give customers bells and whistles that they’ll never use or need.
My transition to MSFT BI has opened my eyes to how Microsoft and their SI’s are meeting business demand in the most cost-effective manner possible. If a BI application like MicroStrategy does not have the functionality that tools like Excel and Access have, $300K-$500K later, it is a frustrating scenario (especially knowing it cost $300-$500K). But if you have a BI solution that is integrated, that is economic in terms of its total cost of ownership, and that has most of the functionality that meets business demands, and through some custom app. dev. you can still solve a need or functionality that does not come out-of-the-box, you are focusing on meeting business requirements in the most cost-effective manner.
Before my transition to MSFT BI, I knew about MSFT BI’s integration and economics, and in selling against MSFT BI, they, of course didn’t want customers to focus on that. But I also knew about MSFT BI’s functionality because I have always worked in Excel and Access and with SQL Server. The other place I witnessed MSFT tool functionality, believe it or not, was in B-of-B applications, because it was INCORPORATED in those applications . If you have ever worked with Business Objects, you know that on the report design level, it is laid out very similar to Excel in terms of cell functionality and formatting and overall layout with tabs and reporting blocks. If you have worked with MicroStrategy, you know that menu trees and overall navigation is laid out pretty similar to Windows; and, on the report design level, even rules such as how many rows of data a query can result in, is limited to ~65K in MicroStrategy 8.0, which is based off Excel’s rules (previous versions). It’s quite interesting that a lot of functionality in B-of-B toolsets comes from or is similar to tools that come from MSFT’s Office division and MSFT BI.
So, I knew about MSFT’s integration, economics, and tool functionality. Today, my transition to Microsoft BI has really opened my eyes to the advance functionality that comes with the latest set of BI offerings from Microsoft. For example, I have really been impressed with what MSFT has been able to accomplish with an enterprise-level BI application (not tool) like Office Performance Point Server 2007 (Office PPS 2007). I’ll tell you that selling against Microsoft BI was mostly based on surfacing lack of functionality and/or performance; and, for many years, I had seen a lot of BI-based, disparate tools from Microsoft, but Office PPS 2007 is more of a scalable performance mgmt. BI application that can easily be benchmarked against any B-of-B tool. It’s more of an application rather than a tool because it includes workflow and process automation and the ability to run on-demand jobs and assignments.
On the Monitoring and Analysis (M&A) side, the dashboard designer is a nice interface, which is pretty easy to use, and creating reports is pretty flexible. The scorecarding functionality borrowed from Business Scorecard Manager and analysis borrowed from ProClarity analytics, including the dashboard features and large no. of report types, all at a bargain price, make the application very attractive. Moreover, PPS has a very scalable architecture, and considerable attention has been given to performance. A thin-client for reporting is missing, but that’s where SharePoint comes in - MOSS is used for both collaboration and report delivery to the Web.
As an initial version of PPS, I think some more changes will be made the UI to make it more intuitive and complete integration with ProClarity Analytics is required in order to completely package ProClarity into PPS (some ProClarity reports are missing – still, ProClarity views can be incorporated into PPS Dashboards). Nevertheless, I’ve been quite impressed with PPS 2007 in terms of the functionality. It is no wonder that when the BI market first got news of the release of PPS 2007 and had some idea of what the app. would be able to do, many performance management vendors such as Hyperion(gulp - Oracle), Cartesis (gulp – BOBJ -> gulp-SAP ), and OutlookSoft (gulp-SAP) soon changed hands. I'm wondering what MSFT's next gulp will be in the BI space...
Anyway, I have made this transition to the MSFT BI world; and, here at SpeakTECH, BI is BI and solving business problems is solving business problems. I used to be in the so, called B-of-B world of MSTR, BOBJ, and Cognos. We were selling Hummers. Robust, Scalable, but gas-guzzling, expensive to purchase, maintain, and manage solutions. Now, I’m in the world of flexible scooters (Excel) and mini-Coopers ( SS Report Services), and Hybrid SUV’s (PPS 2007) that also meet your demand and can get you from point A to B and beyond in a cost-effective, flexible, easy to maneuver manner, and they have a lot of the functionality that a gas guzzling Hummer has – at least the functionality you will most likely need, but they do better by the gallon as you go along, and they are not that much of a different animal..they work with what you already have in use and are a lot more familar in that sense b/c they mesh well with the tools you are already using. I hope that explains the use of the pictures early on.
To conclude, the transition has been relatively smooth...as i said, BI is BI...I look forward to sharing some more perspectives on this transition from my side in the near future
Until next time, it’s Z signing out…..Happy New Year!!!!
Zeeshan Subzwari - Strategy Analyst - Speaktech BI Practice