Alys Woodward
Microsoft acquires ProClarity: the BI balloon goes up
Microsoft has agreed to acquire its Gold Certified partner ProClarity, which provides analysis and visualisation software on top of the Microsoft software stack. ProClarity is a private company and financial terms were not disclosed. Comment: This is a highly significant move by Microsoft and it will cause ripples across the business intelligence (BI) market.The BI pure-play vendors are always aware of the shadow of the enterprise software vendors, and keep a close eye on the big four of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. On the Microsoft front, the acquisition of ProClarity's mature, robust, user front-end software is the one they will have been dreading most. The gap in the front end of Microsoft's platform has pushed it out of a number of deals for a long time, as Microsoft typically provided beefy server tools (database, OLAP server, programming languages) at the back end, with toolkits (Reporting Services) to build front ends. This approach worked well, with Microsoft shops employing developers, or companies prepared to use an additional partner as well as Microsoft, but for many organisations it left too many unknowns and too much development. Adding the ProClarity functionality to Microsoft's core server-based offering immediately puts it in a like-for-like race with Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion in terms of front-end functionality, with the advantage of a perceived greater level of standardisation, as the company provides a wider range of software in terms of its database and its .NET programming architecture.But the news is not all bad for the BI pure-play market. Microsoft will not be the first enterprise software vendor to claim an end-to-end offering: SAP has been pushing its own BI for a number of years with a strong standardisation message, but there has still been space for BI vendors to partner with SAP. In reality, no company has one enterprise standard throughout, and there are benefits in setting a BI enterprise standard that is specifically focused on integrating data from as many types of source as possible. After all, the only companies with no issues around heterogeneous data are startups who have worked from best principles from the very start, and have never merged or acquired. These do exist, but they are few and far between - and are likely to have to handle M&A activity in the future!Microsoft's BI capabilities have been evolving for some time, organisationally as well as technologically. Until 2005, the tools were part of the Server group, as the BI functionality was very much a part of SQL Server. The embedding of the Analysis Services product with the database emphasised this - in fact, Microsoft was the first database vendor to embed its OLAP functionality - Oracle and IBM followed suit in later years. However, since the formation of the Office Business Applications group last year, Microsoft's BI has been focused more around extending the value of Office. The release of Microsoft Scorecard Server in November 2005 was very much centred around selling to business users who were working with Excel and Access and needed to take things a stage further. This plays to the huge strength that is Office, but there are a number of pitfalls around it. Firstly, giving powerful functionality to business users can lead to a proliferation of small departmental applications, which are valuable in themselves, but can cause problems when an overall picture is needed as each department argues the case for its own "version of the truth". Secondly, too much work done by business users (bypassing the IT department) in a BI deployment can mean hygiene factors such as data quality and scalability are overlooked. Finally, users who are not focused on the benefits of enterprise BI may not be prepared to pay extra for their office suites when they include BI, seeing Excel and Access as "good enough".Microsoft is very much back in the BI race - but it hasn't won by any means.
