There’s been lots of talk in the last week or so as the fall-out of the BI consolidation becomes more apparent.  Making decisions on what products to continue developing, which products to end-of-life, and which products you want to punt on and defer to the future is one of the most critical aspects to ensuring an acquisition is successful, and many vendors in the BI space are going through that decision process right now.

 

If you’ve been reading the CIO Magazine and Infoworld articles on vendors recent decisions in this area, you’ll know that thousands of customers are getting ready to enter into the massive gray area of a disruptive product roadmap.  Their product has been discontinued, and while they’ll be on support for a few more years, ultimately they’re going to have to change their underlying IT structure and processes to accommodate a new product user interface, new training, new upgrade paths, new integration—heck, new EVERYTHING.

 

So what we’re hearing more and more of from our customers in terms of their need for an integrated suite of applications in place “today” resonates in light of some of the other news across the industry.  At the end of the day, to accomplish the goals of business intelligence within Microsoft, we’re dependent on two product families—SQL Server, and Office.  That’s it!  Often times our customers are surprised that it’s just those two product groups that comprise the entirety of the MSFT BI portfolio—products that in large part they already own and use extensively throughout their organizations today. 

 

With the capabilities of the Office desktop in Excel and Visio, the collaboration and sharing capabilities of SharePoint Server and Excel Services, and the performance management functionality with PerformancePoint, the Office system of products provides a wide range of capabilities for individuals, teams, and entire organizations to address their most challenging business issues.

 

Coupled that functionality with the amazing data integration, reporting, and analysis BI capabilities of SQL Server 2005 and soon, 2008, and you’ve got a fully integrated stack of BI products that are resident today in many of our customers’ IT environments.

 

Pretty great news for organizations that suddenly have to hunt around and begin to assess the workloads of disruptive upgrades in the coming years!