REDMOND, Wash. — June 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a complete performance management (PM) application including business scorecarding, analytics and planning functionality that enables companies to more effectively plan and manage their businesses. This new application expands Microsoft's growing line of business intelligence (BI) products with a new focus on performance management solutions. Microsoft has established a unique position in expanding the delivery of BI to everyone by focusing on an easier-to-use experience while also delivering the high performance and outstanding price performance businesses require.
News source: Microsoft Press Microsoft's vision for business intelligence is based on three major goals:
· BI for everyone. By providing a user experience in the Microsoft Office system along with the scale and high performance of Microsoft's BI platform, organizations can afford to deliver the right information to more employees so they can make the right decisions — small or large — every day.
· Enterprise-grade reliability, high-performance platform. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 delivers comprehensive capabilities for data integration and transformation (Integration Services); analytical query, calculation, and data mining (Analysis Services); and reporting (Reporting Services); thus helping people at all levels in an organization transform valuable data into shared information they can act on.
· Business view above the data. Managers can synthesize information across multiple systems and multiple parts of the organization to give them a more strategic and forward-looking view of the business than they can get from transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Microsoft has expanded its product line with new investments over time to be a full-line BI provider, with a difference. PerformancePoint Server 2007 expands Microsoft's BI offerings, and delivers performance management capabilities across all departments including finance, operations, sales, marketing and human resources using the familiar Microsoft Office environment to greatly expand the reach of the application.
Microsoft also announced the completion of the ProClarity acquisition. PerformancePoint Server will incorporate ProClarity's advanced analytic and visualization technologies. In addition, Microsoft will continue to sell and support existing ProClarity solutions, and customers under a maintenance agreement will have a free path to the same functionality in PerformancePoint Server.
"We're transforming BI by making it cost-effective and accessible to everyone," said Lewis Levin, corporate vice president of the Office Business Applications group at Microsoft. "Only Microsoft delivers an integrated platform for BI, the most popular end-user tools for analysis, and now a complete performance management application to help companies run their businesses. It's a cost-effective, flexible, well-integrated and complete offering. Now customers can bet on Microsoft for all of their BI needs."
In addition, plans call for Microsoft Dynamics ERP applications to use PerformancePoint as a future, integrated performance management application tailored to meet the specific needs of its customers.
