Day 2 at the BI Conference has come and gone.  I had every intention of posting my thoughts on what's happened over the past few days.  But, my schedule has been non-stop with early morning breakfast meetings through late night dinners with customers.  I've had the chance to meet literally non-stop with customers and partners, along with press and analysts.   I even had a stint manning the PerformancePoint Server kiosk in the Microsoft Pavilion, which was oftentimes several people deep.  Can you believe how jammed the Exhibit Hall has been?!

During the conference, probably the biggest overriding question I've been getting during my conversations has been, "What's going on with PerformancePoint Server since it launched a year ago."   Well, the answer is, "A lot!"   When we launched the product, we had a chance to show PerformancePoint Server to customers, prospects and partners around the world through a mass of launch events, hosting sometimes thousands of people at a time.  Personally, I had a chance to introduce PerformancePoint to audiences in Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Taipei and a number of spots across the US.  It was great to hear people's reaction to the product and a lot of fun to see the product demonstrated in so many different languages.

Now that the product has reached it's one year birthday, we've seen great customer adoption and some pretty interesting stories about the types of returns they're seeing after implementing.  For example, I had a chance to hear yesterday about how Pilot Travel Centers (the US's largest retail travel center operator) found that every one hour of management time they're saving by using PerformancePoint has meant an additonal $1 million to their bottom line!   In an ROI study we did with several customers, we found that another customer grew revenues by 10% and didn't have to add more staff by being able to collect performance data from equipment deployed to their field.  I heard about another retailer that jumped up their gross margins by analyzing and adjusting the revenue mix by having a better view of their data, while also being able to understand buying behaviors and upsell possibilities much more directly.  We've also seen a remarkable increase in the size of customer purchases.  Over the last quarter, we've seen the size of the number of user licenses increase almost 300%!  So, we're very bullish about how the product is being received in the market and how it's helping customers realize the meaning of true business performance improvement.

We're now busy working on the next version of PerformancePoint Server, which will introduce a lot of new capabilities, along with enhancements that are a direct result of customer feedback.  We'll be talking about all that's soon, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Day 3 of the Conference.  I had a chance to peek in on today's general session rehearsal yesterday and got a sneek peek at Kristina Kerr's demo of PerformacePoint using Surface.  Wow!  What an amazing way to bring together two incredible technologies, along with other parts of our business intelligence suite.  Talk about visualizing information in a very powerful way!  I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing people's reaction - it should be very cool!

Now that the conference is over and all the video footage has been compiled, you can see the Surface demo posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbtc_PZOjs