Innovation - Part 1

btamblyn — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:33:00 GMT

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." - Rupert Murdoch

Over the last couple of weeks I've received a couple of emails from readers of my blog - I'm convinced they may be the only ones - but they're building some really innovative data visualisation solutions.

Now I love looking at the numbers (boring I know) but a lot of people at MS now love Excel 2007 because conditional formatting brings data to life.

Andreas and the guys over at Microcharts have built a really neat server side charting extension for Analysis Services and Reporting Services.

They've also built a great solution for a company near and dear to most of us at Microsoft - Adventure Works. Check out their dashboard.

Sam Batterman flagged this one up last week also and talked about the importance of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the role this technology will play in BI in the future. The guys over at Dundas Software have a great data visualisation demo that's well worth a look.

Technorati tags: Innovation, Data Visualisation, Business Intelligence, Charting, Dashboards, Sam Batterman, Excel 2007

Standardisation is Important, Microsoft is not

btamblyn — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:21:33 GMT

This was an interesting post from Craig Schiff last week on b-eye. Craig is the former OutlookSoft CEO, and a BPM pioneer who now works for BPM Partners an independent professional services firm. Craig presented the results of the recent BPM Pulse Survey (here's a link to the webcast recording).

There's some really interesting content in here but unsurprisingly the thing that really caught my eye was this. Craig's summarised it really nicely in three points.

More than two thirds of the respondents are pursuing business performance management as part of their corporate system consolidation/standardization initiatives.
A similar number were not aware of Microsoft's momentous announcement last June about their planned entry into the space.
Of those who were aware of the announcement, the majority said it had little to no impact on their BPM plans.

Now before you think this is just another post from a Microsoft guy defending his turf you're wrong. I'm surprised on one hand that there's a lack of awareness out there about us entering this space but as we approach launch as with all new MS product launches this will no doubt intensify. On the other hand whilst full-scale marketing/PR saturation is great for Vista and even Office when you're trying to emphasise that you're a serious player in this market establishing credibility is not always achieved through fanfare and banner waving and this brings me nicely on to my next point.

The majority of respondents suggest that the announcement will have little or no impact upon their BPM plans - and why should it, WE HAVE TO EARN THE RIGHT TO BE CONSIDERED cause we're the new kids on the block.

That said I think we've got a more than credible offering that will allow us to:

deliver an economic advantage to our customers across Microsoft's entire business intelligence and performance management stack
tell a really compelling integration story from the desktop to the database
provide a platform (as opposed to a suite) that is designed to work together and leveraging (good-or-bad) the most pervasive tool for data analysis available today - Excel

There's a wealth of useful information @ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX101680481033.aspx and it's my job to assist in helping us earn the right to be considered and for the NKOTB I still think we have a pretty good story to tell.

Technorati tags: BPM, Craig Schiff, PerformancePoint, Excel, b-eye, Competitors, Office 2007

Intelligent Insight on PerformancePoint : Excel

Innovation - Part 1

Standardisation is Important, Microsoft is not