Comments on: My thoughts on PerformancePoint Planning’s sunset

By: Russell

Russell — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:55:32 +0000

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.

By: Ajay Singh

Ajay Singh — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:59:48 +0000

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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.

By: Juan Alvarado

Juan Alvarado — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:08:30 +0000

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 ..

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:34:49 +0000

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.

By: Russell

Russell — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:53:53 +0000

The future will tell, won’t it?

By: Performance Point 2007 Roadmap Changes - Andrew Karcher's Bits o' Data

Performance Point 2007 Roadmap Changes - Andrew Karcher's Bits o' Data — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:06:09 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Peter Planning

Peter Planning — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:45:52 +0000

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.