Business Intelligence & Corporate Performance Management
Microsoft BI & CPM
Microsoft’s technology platform can be utilised to successfully deliver broad and complex BI solutions with very high ROI. In addition to the obvious advantage of utilising potentially existing Microsoft enterprise license agreements there are further benefits specific to BI solutions that the Microsoft environment offers. These are:
Completeness
From the Operating System, database engine, and development environment to the Office and Excel Desktop, you can build a complete DW/BI system utilising only Microsoft software. You have an extra margin of confidence that all the components work together effectively.
Low Cost of Ownership
The licensing cost of Microsoft SQL Server has been less than comparable product suites from other vendors, but total cost of ownership depends as much on ongoing support, training, and operations cost as licensing cost.
Microsoft asserts that SQL Server systems need fewer administrative resources than competitive products. Your organisation may already have .NET programming skills. If so, it may be relatively easy for organisations to customise and extend their DW/BI system going forward.
Openness
Although organisations can build a complete DW/BI system with Microsoft software they don’t have to. Any component of the Microsoft DW/BI framework can be swapped out for third-party products, and many customers build Microsoft DW/BI systems in heterogeneous environments.
High Performance, High Scale, High Availability
DW/BI systems with data volumes in the terabytes are fairly common, and 10-20TB is not rare. As DW/BI systems are built on sub-transactional data like clickstreams and RFID data streams, even moderate-sized organisations may find themselves in the “terabyte club”.
Microsoft recognises this trend and engineered and tested their products, especially the SQL server components, to perform well with high data volumes
Microsoft Investment in Business Intelligence
The Microsoft SQL Server 2005 business intelligence suite consists of real tools that work seamlessly together. The tools – especially Analysis Services – are best of breed.
All of the tools are competitive on their own merits with standalone products.
