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Operating Worldwide

Microsoft

Background
Microsoft has been investing steadily, supporting a myriad of Finance-focused software companies and continuing to make inroads with its own product set. Microsoft has built and acquired an impressive set of products in this area:

  • 1989 – MSFT SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2 debuts
  • 1998 – OLAP Services debuts, forerunner of today’s Analysis Services
  • 2000 – Great Plains/Solomon – now Dynamics GP/SL
  • 2000 – Major release of Analysis Services (hits its stride)
  • 2002 – Navision/Axapta – now Dyanamics NAV/AX
  • 2004 – MSFT Reporting Services released
  • 2006 – ProClarity acquired
  • 2007 – Performance Point released

Summary
Microsoft has done a good job of incorporating basic BI tools and capabilities into the product. They have also been successful with integrating these extensions into the typical environment of a Windows developer. Microsoft’s pricing and packaging of its BI platform make it an attractive proposition for organizations new to BI or firms that are looking to reduce their portfolio of BI tools. However the ability to execute programmes in a BI environment must also be viewed from a scalability and performance perspective. While in the past, SQL Server has lead some benchmarks in OTLP processing, it still fails to address the needs of large scale, query intensive applications based on very large data volumes.

That said, the moderate overall complexity as well as an impressive level of autonomy, SQL Server delivers very good manageability for the environments it supports best – small to medium applications on the Windows platform. Some of its initiatives (Analysis Services, Performance Point) take more years to come to fruition – longer than many businesses can wait.

DB Analytics acknowledges the growing importance of Microsoft within the BI arena. Microsoft is driven by innovation and they will continue to release new products to market. As such, we will continue to utilise Microsoft systems where they work best and will remain proficient as the versions and tools evolve. We have comprehensive experience with the following Microsoft products:

  • SQL Server 2005 Integration Services – an SQL Server integrated ETL tool for the consolidation of your data in a central data warehouse.
  • SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services – an SQL Server integrated OLAP-Module to organize your data in a multi-dimensional data cube and to optimize for analyzing purposes.
  • SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services – an SQL Server integrated Reporting tool.