Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Solutions Resonate with Enterprises
Microsoft’s comprehensive, fully integrated BI platform includes Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for group and organization-wide BI, and Microsoft Office Excel and other Office applications for individual BI. Microsoft SQL Server provides the data management and analysis platform, and Microsoft Office Performance Point Server delivers powerful performance management capabilities.
To weigh the solutions’ respective merits, Merck managers compared their performance on 10 “business use cases” representing common usage scenarios and real-life business processes mapped out by information workers themselves, with real-life end users on hand to put them through their paces.
The answers Merck sought from the exercise were simple, says Carlin. “We wanted to see if the functionality could meet all our needs, how long this took and how much it cost. We were looking for maximum functionality at minimum cost.”
The results were emphatic. Microsoft emerged as the hands-down winner, accomplishing all 10 challenges within four weeks.
The other solution? “It managed three out of 10,” says Carlin. As for the remaining seven tasks, “We gave up after six months.”
The Microsoft BI solution gave Merck immediate relief from the headaches it had been experiencing with its previous solution — and at a fraction of the cost, said Carlin, an increasingly critical consideration in the current financial climate.
Today, the system counts 3,000 users and rising across Merck’s Research Labs’ global operations, and other divisions within the multinational company are now sizing it up for prospective rollout.
Soaring Demand
Merck is in the vanguard of a growing wave of companies embracing Microsoft’s BI platform. In 2007, sales of Microsoft’s BI tools spiked by 15.6 percent to US$555 million, outpacing the overall industry growth rate and ranking Microsoft as the fifth-largest BI vendor, according to analyst firm IDC.2
Adoption of SQL Server 2008, released in August, has been especially brisk. More than 1,350 applications based on the platform are already under development by more than 1,000 independent software vendors (ISVs); early customers include Acosta Inc., Clalit Health Services, Hilton Hotels Corp. and Xerox Corp. Looking ahead, Microsoft’s data platform is likely to become more attractive still to large-scale enterprises, thanks to the recent acquisitions of large-volume, high-performance data warehouse application vendor DATAllegro and data quality specialist Zoomix — moves wholeheartedly endorsed by Microsoft BI partner Hitachi Consulting.
“Microsoft continues to be aggressive in adding massive scalability to its enterprise data warehouse capabilities with the acquisition of DATAllegro,” says Todd Price, managing vice president for BI and Performance Management National Practice at Hitachi Consulting. “Hitachi Consulting’s Enterprise Data Warehouse practice will be an active partner in this new product direction as well.”
Earlier this year, Microsoft was placed in the Leaders Quadrant in Gartner’s BI Platforms Magic Quadrant, an accolade it also received in Gartner’s data warehouse database management systems Magic Quadrant in 2007.3
October 13th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Microsoft has always done well from a business intelligence standpoint. I think much of their overall success as a business can be attributed to the fact that they are good at developing business intelligence solutions.