With the imminent release of Microsoft PerformancePoint, I have been asked several times how this will effect our vision for CALUMO and the impact it will have on the BI market generally.
The best way to answer this question is to provide a bit of our history and consider Microsoft’s gradual entry into the market [the market being OLAP, Business Intelligence, and Business Performance Management]. One cannot just consider Microsoft’s play based on PerformancePoint alone. One must view Microsoft’s entry based a long history of software releases starting with Excel Pivot Tables, then OLAP Services for MS SQL, Analysis Services 2000, Data Analyzer, Analysis Services 2005, and now PerformancePoint (built out of ProClarity).
We’ve been in the BI business since the early 90’s. It was around the time, Excel Pivot Tables were released by Microsoft. I remember the fear I felt when some analysts and prospects told us that our business could not survive Microsoft's entry into our space. The same thing happened when OLAP Services was released at the end of 1998 and again later when OLAP Services became Analysis Services 2000. Over the years I’ve watched in awe as Microsoft’s OLAP market share soared from nothing to nearly 30% in 2006. At the same time, our business also grew and has been very successful since those early years.
So why do we think both businesses and others in the space have continued to prosper and grow? Well, as you can imagine we take understanding this pretty seriously. The key things we believe are:
- Microsoft’s incredible reach and marketing machinery educated the market about OLAP and multi-dimensionality.
- Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 did not have enough features and performance to satisfy many of our customers which were mid-market to large corporates (for example, query performance in conjunction with write back was a problem in Analysis Services 2000 which is a major improvement in 2005).
So, rather than going out of business, we met more prospects who understood multi-dimensionality because of Microsoft, but who wanted more than Pivot Tables and Analysis Services 2000 could offer. Many of these organizations became our customers.
Whilst it was a huge relief to still be in business, we were not naïve enough to think that Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 would not one day mature into significantly more complete and competitive offerings.
Based on our research, we considered it significantly more likely that Analysis Services would mature as an OLAP engine before Pivot Tables was enhanced sufficiently to be considered a competitive BPM application. So, how do you take the successful components of a strong BI business not built on Microsoft and align and prosper with the Microsoft platform - once again, we spent many hours considering what our business needed to do to remain competitive and continue to delight our customers.
– In Part 2 next week, I will discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings at the time and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005...