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Panorama misinformation campaign

January 26, 2009, 9:23 pm

Suppose you can’t really blame them for trying to get some mileage out of the recent PPS announcement from Microsoft (see previous blog post), but I found the tone of the email I received today from Panorama more than a little misleading

Microsoft announced last week that they will retire PerformancePoint as a standalone BI product. While some features will be embedded inside future releases of Microsoft Office and SharePoint many customers are concerned with the fact that Microsoft has given up on its strategy to be a major BI application player with dedicated BI products.

Now I spent some time on Sunday chatting through the implications of the announcement with an extremely trusted ex-colleague and member of the Microsoft Consulting Services Information Worker team.

My understanding is currently as follows

  • Sure, for Planning, budgeting & forecasting the future is not Microsoft PerformancePoint – that WILL be effectively retired post SP3
  • For dashboarding, reporting analytics and scorecarding this is most certainly not the case
    • Microsoft have effectively with immediate effect given this functionality away as part of the Sharepoint e-cal licence
    • It was always a separate application element of PPS so you need to think of it like another application service within MOSS (like Excel Services), effectively becoming PerformancePoint Services
    • Further integration of PPS style reporting, dashboarding etc will come with Office14

For me, the move makes so much more sense. When we were looking at the MSFT stack, we were not interested in PPS planning (already having Cognos for that) and it seemed madness to pay £20k or so for the “other bit” of PPS we felt was missing from the MOSS/SSRS stack i.e. the old Proclarity Analytics Server functionality.

I do feel some sympathy for the shops and organisations that invested heavily in PPS Planning…

Category: Performance Point Server, Sharepoint  |  Comment (RSS)  |  Trackback

2 Comments

  1. Oudi Antebi says:
    January 27, 2009 at 9:47 pm

    You can find more information on how we analyze the situation here: http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=129

    We also issued a Press release today: http://www.panorama.com/news/news/archives/2009/jan-27-2009.html

    For the full details We recommend you join a special webcast we are doing on the subject: http://www.panorama.com/webinar_schedule.html

    We are 100% behind what we are stating and recommend you look at the details of the announcement.

  2. Will Riley says:
    February 3, 2009 at 11:27 pm

    Oudi,

    Of course you’re entitled to your take just as I am. I stand by what I said as well though – Not sure I can see how Panorama stacks itself up as a viable alternative for the performance management piece of PPS that is being retired… to me Panorama is a very capable if expensive front-end OLAP tool – It’s not complete BI or Planning solution so I can’t see why Microsoft pulling back from Planning will have any positive impact on Panorama. Monitoring & Analytics etc will continue to be developed (and better integrated) with MOSS at no additional user cost.

    Kind regards,

    Will

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