Hi everyone, I haven't made an appearance on these pages in some time, preferring to let folks like Nic and Ben have all the glory of delivering the news on all the cool things that are happening around Microsoft BI.  But as they're both likely still recovering from their "Who can down the most Hurricane's in 10 minutes" contest I hear was raging at Pat O'Brien's last night at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, I thought I'd step in and deliver some nice news.

We've done a lot of work with our friends at Panorama Software over the course of the last six months or so to put together a great story for our joint customers around an end-to-end BI solution that takes advantage of their capabilities in advanced analytics, and our BI solution as delivered through Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server.  This has involved working with both their senior leadership team, as well as their engineers on ways that we can fashion a clear GTM strategy together, while allowing Panorama the ability to capitalize on the super cool offerings coming up in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2, particually focused on Project Gemini.

I'm happy to link to a great press release that Panorama issued yesterday afternoon focusing on our efforts and their work to be a strong partner on the Microsoft BI platform.  Although we certainly compete with them in certain parts of our offering (as is the case with all our ISV partners, and is a fact of life in this marketplace), this release is proof positive that our BI strategy change is having the desired impact on the marketplace, and allowing our partners to leverage our BI capabilities to deliver their BI capabilities to our joint customers.

Look for more of these types of partnerships and announcements in the coming months leading up to the Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 launches, we're inundated with requests by former competitors and other BI vendors to work with us now to deliver the best solution to our customers.  We're proud to work with Panorama and all our BI partners on this effort!