As a BI Technical Specialist at Microsoft, PPS is (was?) my bread and butter – It’s how I eat. So the changes to the Microsoft’s strategy around the product hit pretty close to home for me. (What? You don’t know what they are? Go here.)
And what do I think? I think it’s a smart move.
Why?
It’s easy for customers
By consolidating M & A into MOSS, we give customers the ability to create impressive, powerful scorecards and dashboards without the purchase of additional “stuff”. Sure, if you’re running MOSS Standard, you’ll need to have an Enterprise CAL, but we’re not talking about a wholesale introduction of new products into your infrastructure. The ability to install PPS as a MOSS shared service (in MOSS14) vs. running yet another setup.exe is good thing – BI is just “in the box” – it is part of your core infrastructure!
It’s good for most customers
Customers I talk to want to deploy scorecards, dashboards, and analytics broadly. I’d guess that < 20% of the people I work with want to do Planning, and are only doing so for a small number of users. While dashboards are pretty darn easy to create and deploy, planning takes quite a bit more work. You generally need hire to consultants to help you create a solution which will only service a relatively small population of your users.
With a limited amount of development time on our hands, I think it makes sense to focus on scenarios that affect the largest number of customers. Microsoft is all about “BI for the masses”, not “BI for the 15 business analysts”. We can now focus on what we do best – creating good, inexpensive software for everyone.
Moving forward, competitors will clearly attack our offering for having no ready-bake planning solution, and they’ll be on target with their criticism. I bet analysts like Gartner will ding us, too. But, so what? The planning audience is not what we’re about, and in this economy, who wants to pay for features they don’t need?
It makes our BI story easier to understand
OK, I admit it – we have some feature overlap across our products. ? Every vendor does. Before this change, when a customer thought “KPI”, he could do it in Excel/Excel Services, MOSS, Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, and soon, Gemini. That’s quite a selection of hammers!
With PPS Services inside MOSS, we’re simplifying things – you use MOSS to do this work. Using Excel, SSRS, etc. clearly become edge-case solutions because the MOSS offering is so strong by comparison.
If I need to do an “elevator” pitch on Microsoft BI, I now can say, “Microsoft BI is SQL Server, Office and SharePoint. Fat client data visualization is inside Excel, thin client data visualization is inside SharePoint.”
Done. End of story.
I’m greedy
I’m an MSFT shareholder and employee. By making MOSS even more attractive, I think the net gain in revenue we’ll realize as a result people adopting it and/or upgrading to the MOSS enterprise CAL (don’t forget additional indirect SQL Server and Windows Server sales) will be far greater than the bucks we see from a stand-alone PPS product. That’s money in my pocket.
If you had experience utilizing BPM at a company you would take into consideration what a complete offering encompasses and embedded that into your analysis of Microsoft failed strategy in the BPM arena anounced today.
The feature set of PPS MA is very limited. ProClarity is being discontinued as a product and Planning is discontinued. By cutting even more of the feature set and giving it away in MOSS is not a successful strategy when you are competing with SAP, Oracle and IBM in the same field of BPM.
Get serious.
Peter.
[...] BI technologies into a large number of users within the enterprise. Here is another post from Russell Christopher on some of the benefits of this [...]
The future will tell, won’t it?
I can compare the rules the functionality and the logic with the architecture from both Cognos and Hyperion, and Microsoft was really on to something here. PPS Planning was extremely flexible, and it also gave you control like no other solution today. And the technical architecture was great compared to the competition, the competition is really lipstick on a pig, mostly old stuff.
Scorecards and SharePoint are not core functionality for performance management just a layer to the intelligence of a performancemanagement solution. People that say that Planning is a weak product are either not familiar with the product or does not have knowledge of financial/process issues at enterprises, especially outside the US. Microsoft has now left the CPM market. From today MS have no no support of IFRS. MS support of budgeting-forecasting at multinational enterprises are from now non existing.
The problem was the product roll-out, selling CPM solutions is different from selling share point or office, the organization just started to get going, and great things
were on the way.
With PerformancePoint Planning Microsoft boldly entered the CPM market, with big words and grand strategies, to go head to head against Oracle and IBM. Today just one year after the grand product release, they bail out, in the shade of the night leaving the CPM market on walk over to the benefit of Oracle, SAP and IBM. For loyal customers and partners this is hard to understand.
Good for and MS. Bad for the customers and partners that trust in the PPS Planning and think that have a product with a long life (planning part). Maybe next time MS will think in the partnes and customer that waste resource, money and time before take desicion ..
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I’d guess that < 20% of the people I work with want to do Planning, and are only doing so for a small number of users.
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If my understanding is correct, Planning is not something Organization ‘want to’ / ‘dont want to’ do. Its something they have to do. And the Analytic / Monitoring part which is being merged into Sharepoint will not make any sense unless I have a planning software where planning is done and that data is being analyzed in Dashboard for comparing against Actuals.
So the net is Customer will still need Planning Software and they will have two options.
1 – Go for other Vendor.
2 – Wait for MS update to see if Planning capability is being enabled in other (e.g Dynamics) software.
Sure, everyone plans, but does everyone need budgeting and forecasting capabilities to do so? I haven’t found that to be the case. I work with a wide array of PPS customers, and like I said – ~ 70-80% are just doing M & A.
I’d think that if more people needed planning, a higher % would actually implement – they don’t. These customers still build dashboards which compare actual vs. budget vs. plan, but they don’t leverage “planning” to get there.
The companies that need budgeting/forecasting functionality also tend to already have it – SAP/OutlookSoft, Oracle/Hyperion, IBM/Cognos, etc. Microsoft’s planning product goes head-to-head with well-established competitors who probably are already entrenched at most of the organizations Microsoft wants to talk to.
In the long term, Microsoft could (and maybe will) improve our planning offerings and again go toe-to-toe with these guys. But in the meantime (and in this financial climate), why compete in an area where MSFT is relatively weak compared to the incumbents? And why be distracted by that 20% when we can go for the much bigger piece of the BI pie?
In my opinion, of the “big 4” in BI, only Microsoft can realistically offer “BI for the masses” (regardless of what SAP says) in terms of TCO and the ability of users to actually use the products. If that’s our strength, we should play to it.