Microsoft is heralding a steady stream of product announcements around Office 2007, perhaps in the hopes that folks will forget the most glaring fact of all: Microsoft isn’t Vista-ready.
The French call it drowning the fish.
In its latest public display, the company brought together business partners and journalists
to announce a product roadmap for Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a
business intelligence (BI) solution that is intended to take up where
Business Scorecard Manager and Proclarity Analytics Server leave off.
And much like its introduction of Duet
last May, it’s all about driving Office 2007.
Microsoft is presenting PerformancePoint as a means of addressing customer
demand for a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solution. The solution
spans the entire software stack, from SQL servers and SQL 2005 RDBMS data
warehousing on the back end, to SharePoint BI tools, including scorecards,
analytics and planning tools on the front end.
“Customers want a complete product line to support and scale across the
entire organization,” said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business
division.
But the principal feature of PerformancePoint is that Office 2007 will act
as the interface for all Microsoft BI applications.
Michael Smith, director of Office Business Applications at Microsoft, told
internetnews.com that the product is intended to “advance our
strategy to make Office more strategic to our customers.”
Since most people are familiar with the Office interface, PerformancePoint
will help enterprises drive greater adoption of BI applications.
This, said Smith, “makes broader deployment easier and more cost-effective.”
Generating sales of Office 2007 by vaunting the features of PerformancePoint
might give some customers a compelling reason to upgrade
from their current versions of Office.
But the strategy may not play so well with Microsoft’s intended target,
noted Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch.
That’s because the Microsoft approach — assuming end-to-end Microsoft
hegemony — won’t play in larger enterprises that run more heterogeneous
environments, including Unix and Linux servers.
“If Unix users can’t access their file shares anymore because IT moved
everything to SharePoint, that’s going to be a problem,” Wilcox said. “That’s one of the weaknesses of the Microsoft strategy.”
In terms of an actual roadmap, Microsoft will continue selling Proclarity
Analytics Server and Business Scorecard Manager until sometime in mid-2007,
when those two products will converge in the form of PerformancePoint.
Microsoft promised that customers investing in its current offering would
not be wasting their money, as they would be upgraded to the same
functionality as found in PerformancePoint.
“Proclarity functions are being mapped to Office 2007,” said Raikes.
A detailed functional roadmap will be available in September, Raikes said.
