And The Winner Is…

So after much research, discussion and thought, TGO Consulting has mapped out the new road map for our business intelligence practice.  A lot of work has gone into our decisions and I hope we have made the right choices.  I can’t speak for everyone here, but if I have to be involved in restructuring a BI practice a 3rd time, you are going to next see me on the evening news with the phrase ”goes postal” being used to describe my actions. 

After the dust (and anger) settled on the January PPS announcement we got down to business and began working out our options.  We were still convinced that there was a huge opportunity for BI/CPM offerings and even though Microsoft might have made a stupid decision we still wanted to pursue the market.

The first thing we did was to decide if we were still on-board with PerformancePoint M&A now that it was being shifted to the SharePoint group.  Ultimately the answer was “yes”, although we did/do have some concerns as to how much attention (i.e., development dollars, marketing, support, etc.) PeformancePoint Services will be receiving now and in the future.  We also worry about the potential marginalization of the product.  The fear here is a potential erroneous perception that since it is now a “free” feature within MOSS, then just how good could it be and just how seriously is it being handled by Microsoft.  Because of that we have decided to boost our offerings in this area and will be utilizing more Excel (with and without Gemini), Virtual Earth and Visio into our solutions.  We are also toying with adding Xcelsius to our mix as well.

So after we had taken care of the M&A side of the house we had to decide what to do for planning.  We we were committed to offering a complete CPM solution.  Right away we decided that before any final decision we would wait until the Dynamics group released their product road map.  Not only did it make business sense to wait, but I think to some degree, as irrational as it was, we still hoped that the Dynamics team would decide that PPS Planning made the most sense and that they would keep it alive.   Hope springs eternal as they say.   

So What Next?

With the demise of PerformancePoint Planning both TGO and myself have had to adjust our BI strategy.   It has taken many months and a lot of effort but we have finally finalized our new plans (pretty much).  The new plan will include implementation of another high-end planning package, although we are not ready to formally announce any selection yet.  Stay tuned though as we hope to  have something formalized in the next few weeks.

So with this new strategy you will see more of the following in this blog:

• PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics as the stand-alone product it is today
• Using Virtual Earth, Excel and Visio as a front-ends to help visually present data to the end user
• Implementation of SharePoint and using it as a central hub for displaying line of business data
• Posts on the new planning application once we finalize our selection

Now that things will hopefully be getting back to normal for us, I am going to try getting back to posting new content at least once per week.

Sign of the Apocalypse — I’m a Microsoft MVP

I got the email this morning congratulating me on being awarded the MVP designation from Microsoft.  I am now a SQL Server MVP.  Whoa!

So why SQL Server when all my knowledge and contributions were pretty much based around PerformancePoint Server?  Damn good question.  As I understand it, a group of us were nominated in the PerformancePoint Server category and in the queue prior to Microsoft deciding to discontinue PPS as a stand-alone product.  However, since the awards are “product based” when PPS went away they had to put us somewhere.  I am guessing that since PPS was a business intelligence product they figured it made the most sense to put us under the product that is platform that delivers BI for Microsoft — SQL Server.  If you think about it, anyone who successfully implemented PerformancePoint (Planning or M&A) had to deal with SQL or SSAS on a regular basis.  I am sure others might make a case that SharePoint would have been the better choice.  Who knows.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank a few others here at TGO Consulting for all their hard work.  Shout outs are in order for Grantley, Richard and most definitely Jerry.  All of them work on PerformancePoint with me and their knowledge and experience has contributed to my own.   

Finally a big thanks to those clients who took a leap of faith on PerformancePoint.  Without their ”unique” needs as a driving force, I never would have been driven to learn PerformancePoint to the degree I did. 

I am still wading through the materials that cover all the benefits of being an MVP.  What jumped out at me is that I think the award entitles me to stay free at Bill Gates’ house whenever I visit the Seattle area.  I could be reading things wrong though.  Can anyone confirm this for me?

Commentary on the Planning Road Map from the Dynamics Group

Right now the Dynamics group within Microsoft ”owns” Management Reporter and is currently responsible for any future budgeting/forecasting/planning solution that will come from Microsoft.  During Convergence 2009, the Dynamics group finally released their road map to the world.

To help set this up, I think a brief history lesson is in order.  For many years the Dynamics group supported two budgeting/forecasting products — Forecaster and Enterprise Reporting.  You can think of them as little brother and big brother.  Forecaster had pre-build budgeting models and parameters you worked within and therefore the deployments were quick and easy as long as those parameters worked for your business.  Enterprise Reporting could be considered an predecessor to PerformancePoint Planning.  You built models from scratch and could ultimately do more with them, but it took more work to complete a project.  Both of these products were ”mothballed” in favor of the new corporate wide CPM solution from Microsoft – PerformancePoint Server.  Basically they had ceased new development on both products and were only providing support.  In fact, they had gone so far as to actually take Enterprise Reporting completely off of the price list. 

Now my understanding is that the Dynamics group was pretty much blindsided by the announcement just like the rest of us.  And since it is pretty tough to sell an ERP package to larger clients without some sort of planning capabilities, you can surmise how important this future road map is for them.  I was lucky enough to see a preview of their road map about 3 weeks ago, but was under NDA so couldn’t comment at the time.  Now that everything is public, I am free to shoot off my mouth.

For the rest of this post, please keep in mind that this is my interpretation of the information presented and I may have missed or misunderstood something.  Also keep in mind that Microsoft has been known to change their mind suddenly about planning applications and all of this information could be totally different next week or next month.