Calumo - Business Intelligence and Performance Management Blog

One of our clients recently showed me this report. Names and numbers have been changed, but in my conversation with them, they were very excited about it and it was clearly an important source of information for them. Their Revenue Analysis Dashboard gives them an immediate window and insight into their top performing regions, clients, products and sectors.

Look at the drop-down lists to see how they can drill deeper into any region, product or sector (I need to ask them why they don't need to dig deeper into client, but if they wanted to, a client drop-down could be added to the dashboard in 5 minutes). Other variables on the report can also be changed (time, currency, etc), so each country can see their data in local currency and head office can consolidate in any currency. They can also look at current or prior period performance or any aggregation of time (eg last quarter, or last year).

Every CALUMO report that uses drop-downs is in effect many reports. In this case, this single report represents thousands of potential combinations.

The data is securely stored in SQL Server, while the dashboard is a simple CALUMO web page for fast, secure, scalable reporting available anywhere. Being a dynamic report, when any variables change, the top ten results are updated and sorted on the fly. Naturally they also have a bottom-ten report for badly performing and unprofitable regions, clients, products and sectors.

Our client also uses CALUMO for convenient and rapid data collection during their planning, budget and forecasting cycles. Furthermore, CALUMO is used for guided self-service analytics. With its excellent query performance, analysis can be refined produced immediately, leading to even clearer insights and smarter actions.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

With the release of SQL Server 2005 and even more so with the release of SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has delivered OLAP and relational repositories in a single unified solution. Now both OLAP and OLTP is delivered on the same server, through the same API and managed using one set of tools. This is in contrast to other relational database vendors and their respective OLAP servers who have primarily converged their front-end tools while leaving the back-ends unchanged and dis-integrated.

SQL Server’s integrated components include SQL Server Integration Services for ETL, SQL Server Reporting Services for transactional reporting, SQL Server Analysis Services as their OLAP server, and native integration with Excel and SharePoint.

Written from the ground-up in .Net 3.5 (C#), CALUMO 11 is a further extension of this unified platform approach. For example, CALUMO does not create another repository for data, or another modeling engine for business rules and calculations. So, for planning, budgeting and forecasting applications (or any data collection activity) CALUMO input forms provide bottom-up and top-down write back directly into SQL Server and Analysis Services. For dashboards, reporting and analysis, if you already have Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services cubes, simply install CALUMO and you immediately have access to this data in a way that is so simple and convenient, it will forever change the way you think about business intelligence and effective collaboration.

For our customers, CALUMO is sublimely integrated with the way they work, whether through email, spreadsheets, the internet, a SharePoint portal and even PowerPoint.

“The front-end is intuitive and flexible in that we have a range of options for delivery to the wide range of users in our user community. For example, we can use a web portal, standard web for more advanced users, Excel for standard users and power users, deliver PDF’s or hard coded Excel reports. It is so open and flexible as to our options on both the data we choose to analyze, administration or the user experience.”
Alister Cairns, University of New South Wales

About CALUMO 11
CALUMO 11 — Performance Management (CALUMO) is a unified performance management application built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

CALUMO provides all facets of performance management including Business Intelligence; metrics and KPI dashboards; reporting and analysis; planning, budgeting, forecasting and modeling; management reporting, operational reporting and financial consolidations.

CALUMO provides exceptional value with a low entry cost and fast, initial implementations. CALUMO then scales to support enterprise-class performance management

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

CALUMO RELEASES NEW VERSION OF ITS PLANNING AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATION

SYDNEY – 4 June, 2009 — CALUMO Group today announced it has launched a new version of its Planning and Performance Management Application – CALUMO 11, which will work with Microsoft Windows® 7/Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 to offer customers enhanced security, as well as innovative user interface features and reliability improvements. CALUMO 11 is a Planning and Performance Management Application which delivers unified Performance Management for the continuous cycle of reporting, planning, monitoring and action on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

“Our ISV community is alive with innovation, and we’re committed to helping our partners drive the next generation of software experiences,” said Ross Brown, Vice President of ISV and Solutions Partners for the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft. “Adding compatibility for the latest Microsoft operating systems helps ISVs to stay ahead of the competition and give their customers access to cutting-edge technologies.”

“CALUMO is excited to launch this new version of CALUMO 11,” said Dominic Parsons, CEO at CALUMO Group. “Making our application compatible with Microsoft Windows 7/Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 helps us offer our customers compelling benefits, including intuitive user interfaces, tools to keep them connected to data stored on the Web and full support for multi-core processing.”

About CALUMO 11
CALUMO 11 — Performance Management (CALUMO) is a unified performance management application built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.

CALUMO provides all facets of performance management including Business Intelligence; metrics and KPI dashboards; reporting and analysis; planning, budgeting, forecasting and modelling; management reporting, operational reporting and financial consolidations.

CALUMO provides exceptional value with a low entry cost and fast, initial implementations. CALUMO then scales to support enterprise-class performance management.

As part of CALUMO’s continuous improvement and proven track record for development software that can be used now and tomorrow, CALUMO has leveraged new features for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 giving better performance and more simple installation.  No other BI/BPM vendor is ready for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME’s to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

PerformancePoint Services included in MOSS
On 24 Jan Microsoft announced the decision to consolidate PerformancePoint Server Monitoring and Analytics into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Microsoft is making it easier for customers to achieve "BI for the masses" by including PerformancePoint Services in the SharePoint Enterprise license thereby delivering the complete Microsoft BI Platform (SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server) to customers at an even lower total cost of ownership.
 
PerformancePoint Planning Discontinued
Microsoft also announced that PerformancePoint Planning will be discontinued. It must be remembered that PerformancePoint Planning was only a planning application built on the Microsoft BI Platform. Discontinuing this first version planning application is actually liberating to what is now an even more unified BI platform comprising SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server.

Performance Management = Planning + Business Intelligence
Discontinuation of PerformancePoint Planning does not mean that customers cannot "do planning" on the Microsoft BI Platform. The essence of planning applications (budgeting and forecasting) is allowing users to input feedback both numbers and text (write back). Planning also includes other features (eg manipulating data according to business rules etc), but most of these are also BI features. The term Performance Management is used to describe the convergence of Planning and BI on a unified platform – the cycle of Plan, Monitor, Analyze. The advantages of true Performance Management are readily evident by integrating planning with BI in order to analyze and compare history with future plans and what-if analyses. The architecture of effective Performance Management must be unified.  Failing to do so requires constant batching and transformation as the many parts of the system exchange data.  Few (if any) vendors other than Microsoft can lay claim to this architecture.

How then to achieve Planning + Performance Management on Microsoft's BI platform
CALUMO Planning is a complete planning application built on the Microsoft BI platform. The CALUMO features below summarize planning capability, the missing pieces of the performance management puzzle, with integration to SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server.

1. Planning input forms - Bottom-Up and Top-Down write back
2. Self Service Reporting and Analysis - Ad-hoc (pivot) browse and dynamic reports
3. Excel and Web client for ad-hoc browse, reports and input forms
4. Simple, flexible architecture - Planning over any SQL Server Analysis Services cube structures
5. Support for: Drill Down (Members), Drill Through (Transactions or Cubes), Grids, Charts, Freeze frames, Text management, Slice to Excel etc.
6. Integration with SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server

Alfred E. Neuman "What, me worry?"  Hecklers will claim a gap-toothed smile in Microsoft's BI capability. Don't be fooled, CALUMO is evidence that planning is not missing and will continue to work with customers and Microsoft to offer true Performance Management on Microsoft’s unified BI Platform. Web budgeting at the University of New South Wales is just one example of this.

CALUMO - Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner of the Year
For the CALUMO Group, 2008 Microsoft BI Partner of the Year, the withdrawal of PerformancePoint Planning has removed any perceived confusion or conflict over differences between PerformancePoint Planning and CALUMO Planning. CALUMO Performance Management, including planning has a credible track record and heritage, including Microsoft case studies at the University of New South Wales and Aevum

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Microsoft Announces Updates to Business Intelligence Roadmap
A summary of this announcement is the decision to discontinue PerformancePoint Planning and merge PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analytics into SharePoint as PerformancePoint Services.

Customers Benefit with Business Intelligence at a lower TCO
Effective immediately, SharePoint enterprise customers can download PerformancePoint for free. Conversely, customers who bought PerformancePoint with software assurance can download SharePoint for free.

View this video with Guy Weismantel, Director of Microsoft BI, where he explains these changes and the future value Microsoft customers will gain from this strategy.

Also read the Q&A with Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. The interview gives some insight into the strategy announcement, why Microsoft made this decision, how planning customer will be supported and what the overall benefit to customers will be.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com), Microsoft BI Partner of the Year 2008, is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specializations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Microsoft announced the release of SQL Server 2008 on August 6th, 2008. Code-named "Katmai", SQL Server 2008 is the new version of the company’s acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform. This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services.

SQL Server includes several data management and analysis components as follows:

Database Engine
The Database Engine is the core service for storing, processing and securing data. The Database Engine provides controlled access and rapid transaction processing. The Database Engine also provides rich support for sustaining high availability.

Analysis Services - Multidimensional Data
Analysis Services supports OLAP by allowing you to design, create, and manage multidimensional structures that contain data aggregated from other data sources.

Analysis Services - Data Mining
Analysis Services enables you to design, create, and visualize data mining models which can be constructed from other data sources by using a wide variety of industry-standard data mining algorithms.

Integration Services
Integration Services is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including packages that provide extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing for data warehousing.

Replication
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another, and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency.

Reporting Services
Reporting Services delivers enterprise, Web-enabled reporting functionality so you can create reports that draw content from a variety of data sources, publish reports in various formats, and centrally manage security and subscriptions.

Service Broker
Service Broker helps developers build scalable, secure database applications. This new Database Engine technology provides a message-based communication platform that enables independent application components to perform as a functioning whole.
 
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

IBM Cognos TM1 9.4 was released on August 14 and can be downloaded from the Cognos support site for registered customers (userid and password required).

Key new features of this release include:

1. "Active Forms" replace dynamic slicing
   TM1 9.4 has removed dynamic slicing.  Instead, new Active Forms allow for standard Excel format options in a worksheet and to view and update live TM1 cube data directly in Excel when connected to a TM1 server.
2. New features to support Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
   - Three TM1 Administrator Roles
   - New TM1 Audit Log
3. Long String Support
   TM1 9.4 supports strings longer than 255 bytes in cell data and SQL statements.
4. Microsoft Windows Vista and Excel 2007 Support
   - New TM1 ribbon for Excel 2007
   - .xlsx files can be opened in TM1 Web if Excel 2007 is installed on the web server
5. TM1 Web 64-bit IIS Support
6. Unicode Support for multiple languages

A more detailed review of all these new features can be found in the attached TM1 NEW FEATURES GUIDE.

Pictured: In 9.4 seconds, a WORLD RECORD by Frank Wykoff runnning the 100 YARD DASH on June 7, 1930 - A segue reference to "version 9.4" (since Usain Bolt can only run 100m in 9.69 seconds) and a reference to the legendary speed of TM1 cubes.

Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4
Other exciting developments include Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4.
At the Cognos TM1 Forum this week (3-5 September) Cognos demonstrated how Cognos 8 Business Intelligence enhances the deployment and implemention of IBM Cognos TM1. This included complex and simple reports, multi-source dashboards, report packs, comprehensive analyses, managed reports with prompts, scorecards, scheduling, distribution and alerts, without scripting or coding!

Utilising the real-time in-memory facilities of TM1 cubes, data updates can be reflected immediately by the BI components. Employing a multi-user live scenario, Cognos illustrated these abilities in a web-based zero footprint environment.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Mikado Dynamics (a CALUMO Group associated company) is an IBM Cognos Platinum Reseller Partner. The Group is the longest standing performance management solution provider in Cognos TM1, with over 12 year’s experience.

– In Part 1, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this benefited us by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and what has become Business Performance Management.
– In Part 2 last week, I discussed our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005.
– This week I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

Let me start by saying that in our view Microsoft’s entry with PerformancePoint is an important validation of the BPM market as a whole.

For PerformancePoint, the immediate opportunity is to see how ProClarity has been combined with existing capability such as Business Scorecard Manager and other new capability to provide a framework for budgeting, forecasting, planning, and consolidation. In light of PerformancePoint and other developments, we will continue to embrace any new capability if we think there are components of the technology that make sense and add value for our customers. CALUMO is a certified member of the “Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse Alliance” and for a long time now we have leveraged elements of the Microsoft BI platform to deliver our BPM applications. We intend to continue to rely on this approach.

What differentiates our offering is that we continue to offer significant application logic over and above the Microsoft platform. As I mentioned in my previous post, the market understands BI and BPM because of Microsoft’s reach, but often needs or wants a more sophisticated solution than is available through vanilla Microsoft. The OLAP Report has just released its annual OLAP Market Shares showing Microsoft's share increase by nearly 4% from 2005 to 31.6% for 2006. Tellingly the report also states that “Microsoft Analysis Services is typically chosen by smaller organizations”. CALUMO extends the reach to medium and large organizations with more advanced capability than would otherwise be satisfied by a non-Microsoft solution such as Hyperion, Cognos, or Business Objects.

Partnership with Microsoft

In our view, Microsoft sees the value of working closely in partnerships that can add value to their stack. An example of this is their Office Business Applications (OBA) initiative. Microsoft wants Partners to develop applications that integrate closely with Microsoft Office to front-end business applications. These OBA’s are important to Microsoft because they provide a way to get Office entrenched in businesses. By the way, OBAs are for use with Office 2007 only. With our extended Calumo OBA we take the program even further with extensive integration with Internet Explorer, SQL Server 2005 and support for older versions of Excel.

Our technical partnership makes sense too. If you look at the BI/BPM landscape as a whole, it’s increasingly becoming a black and white choice between new technology solutions versus old technology solutions. CALUMO had a blank canvas technology wise and functionality wise. As a result, we don’t have any integration issues with multiple products or legacy code. Everything is .Net2.0 and SSAS. Technically therefore working closely with Microsoft is mutually beneficial. Originally it was only a question of an order of magnitude increase in performance between 2000 and 2005. Of late it’s been a best practice approach in database design and high-end business requirements.

Our value-add over PerformancePoint includes operational analytics, predictive analytics, and depth and breadth across our applications. To try and be more specific regarding depth and breadth across applications, some of our features available through both Excel & the Web include:

• Ad-hoc Browse (through Excel and or the Web)
• Slice to Excel
• Rich Excel client functionality
• Web Reports - functionally rich, dynamic, freeze frames
• Read Only or Write back (through Excel and or the Web)
• Bottom-Up (basic & advanced)
• Top-Down  (basic & advanced)
• MDX Support
• Support for Stacked Dimensions
• Multiple Cubes within a single view
• Report/Batch Manager
• Text management
• Drill Down (Members)
• Drill Through (Transactions or Cubes)
• Advanced Member Search & Sort
• Save Data Views
• Save Member Subsets
• Support for Member Aliases
• Support for Grids, Charts, Gauges
• Data Filter - rankings, top/bottom n or %
• X64

Regarding our competitors, a significant differentiator is our ability to offer a complete BPM application on a single unified platform (no legacy code, no integration issues with multiple products). Our Excel Add-in is also very advanced including no less than 35 spreadsheet functions. We have given Excel a lot of thought and focus in development.

This brings us to where we are today where we continue to forge ahead with our vision and believe that the Microsoft BPM Applications gap remains a significant opportunity. We continue to diligently draw upon our previous 10 years subject matter expertise to build sophisticated BPM applications. While we are doing this, the number of Calumo customers continues to grow.

– In Part 1 last week, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this was beneficial by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and Business Performance Management (BPM). This week I discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005..

In 2003, we began a “from the ground up” development of our BPM application powered by Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Our product CALUMO is the result of these efforts. The development brief was to build a sophisticated BPM application at least equal to or better than what we had done in the past (SPF Plus on TM1 OLAP Server). It also had to be better than the solutions offered by our competitors (Cognos, Hyperion, Outlooksoft etc).

A standout item of research that illustrates the opportunity we saw is the chart below which correlates OLAP Market shares (per the OLAP Report) against the BPM Applications market shares (per IDC).

Note that Hyperion has almost precisely the same OLAP and BPM market shares, yet Microsoft has nearly 30% OLAP market share, but only a trivial BPM share. This is an enormous gap of nearly 25%. Although there are other 3rd party players who leverage Analysis Services filling some of this gap (eg about 2% each from Outlooksoft and GEAC, plus others which were not tracked by IDC), our research showed that most of these customers needs were not being fulfilled. They were either:

• Not using Analysis Services (ie they were using SQL Server, but the OLAP module was shelf-ware), or
• the applications were very simple and could not be classified as BPM.
• In some of these cases the gap was or is being filled with a non Microsoft solution for both the OLAP and BPM components (eg Hyperion, Cognos or TM1).

We believed that providing for and filling the Microsoft BPM Applications gap was the most significant and neglected market opportunity at the time. For us, it has been about being first to market with the latest technology on Analysis Services 2005. It’s also about providing a more sophisticated application than Hyperion, Cognos and our other competitors on a unified platform.

Software development is never easy, but our decisions and efforts so far have been more than vindicated:

• Analysis Services 2005 has proven to be a dramatic improvement on 2000,
• and, because we built CALUMO from the ground up, we don’t have any legacy code, or integration issues with multiple products. Everything is .Net2.0 and we are not trying to support customers on both MSAS and SSAS.
• Also, the subject matter expertise we have from our previous 10 years of BPM software development, has allowed us to design what we consider to be a complete, sophisticated and functionally rich application (for Web, Excel, Reporting, Analysis, Write-back and predictive analytics on one unified platform).

Looking back, we achieved what we set out to do, but how do we continue on this path of judicious serendipity? In light of PerformancePoint and other Microsoft BI initiatives, we’re now even more excited about leveraging Microsoft technology and our ability to build software that could fill the 25% BPM applications gap.

– In Part 3 next week, I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

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...

Microsoft has published a 120 page Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide.

Major topics from the contents page include:

• Enhancing Query Performance
  • Understanding the querying architecture
  • Optimizing the dimension design
  • Maximizing the value of aggregations
  • Using partitions to enhance query performance
  • Writing efficient MDX
• Tuning Processing Performance
  • Understanding the processing architecture
  • Refreshing dimensions efficiently
  • Refreshing partitions efficiently
• Optimizing Special Design Scenarios
  • Special aggregate functions
  • Parent-child hierarchies
  • Complex dimension relationships
  • Near real-time data refreshes
• Tuning Server Resources
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses memory
  • Optimizing memory usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses CPU resources
  • Optimizing CPU usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses disk resources
  • Optimizing disk usage

The guide is currently applicable to SQL Server Service Pack 2. We hope this is an indication that it will become a living document with further contributions and enhancements as SSAS 2005 evolves and further expert knowledge is acquired through research and practical experience.

Congratulations to the authors and subject matter experts who contributed to this document. As Mosha Pasumansky (one of the contributing subject matter experts) says on his blog "This guide is a big deal, and anybody serious about Analysis Services 2005 should download it and read from end to end."

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