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.
