Microsoft, Business Intelligence, & the Open Source Software Advantage
This week, Microsoft hosted its
annual Business Intelligence conference and the early announcements from this event have been (as expected)
fascinating. Most interestingly, Microsoft has introduced new code-named projects designed to
support BI on a “massive scale at low TCO” and deliver “managed self-service BI”
and “People-ready BI”. I will say, if this were buzzword bingo, Microsoft would have a
covered card. So, what does all this mean?
At least one analyst has already
weighed in and
correctly pointed out that Microsoft’s announced projects won’t deliver products with real
features for some time (Microsoft itself estimates 2010). And even then, on Microsoft’s
behalf, I fear that basing its pervasive BI strategy on the client software underpinnings of Microsoft
Office is dubious. We know that the average desktop user consumes about 10% of the feature set of the
major Microsoft office products (Word and Excel, particularly). If you’re like me, many of the
more sophisticated Office features are surely out-of-reach, unless you commit to attending a course or
spend a lot of time reading the documentation. So, adding more business intelligence capabilities to an
already-overburdened Excel and expecting this to become used pervasively seems specious, at
best.
Does the world need more complex desktop office suites? Or, does pervasive BI really
require a very different approach? It won’t surprise you to know that I believe the future of
business intelligence is about lightweight client software, web 2.0-savvy interfaces throughout,
adaptable and modular architectures, and the ability to deliver consistent functionality to any
intelligent device (not just those that can run Microsoft Office properly). I’ve written
here
about these principles before (under the headline of "Web 2.0 and Pervasive BI). And, as sure
as I’m writing this, I recognize that the next five years will yield a number of barely predictable
advancements, all web-based, to which an agile BI toolset must adapt. How does a proprietary architecture
built upon aged, complex designs flex to quickly support such new capabilities? It
doesn’t. Market-driven adaptability, based on a modern and flexible architecture,
is one of the real (and less talked about) advantages of open source software. It is surely the way
we’ve been building Jaspersoft’s BI tools into the disruptive force that is destined to make
BI pervasive.
Open source software, fundamentally, is about the community’s involvement in the
development of software – which helps ensure new capabilities are added quickly and in a way that
is consistent with the needs of the market. If a feature or capability is important, the odds that
one or more of Jaspersoft’s nearly 90,000 registered community members will want to help is
extremely high. How could 90,000 community members advance our products meaningfully without an
open, modular, modern architecture that not only allows but promotes such advancement? Imagine a
developer outside of Microsoft trying to add a feature to the proprietary code base of Microsoft Office.
Now that would require business intelligence.
In my experience with several BI platforms, both commercial and open source, one of the most used feature turns out to be “export to Excel”. So, try as we may, there are valid reasons to cater towards a BI user’s natural flow of anlayzing data, and let them get their data into Excel.
And in that sense, Microsoft’s approach may have its merit in looking at Excel as the piece in the front and center for self service BI. Of course, calling it “democratization” maybe far fetched because this democracy will only be true in the Microsoft Office world, but it is a pretty big world of BI users. And for those who would like to stay far away from the Microsoft Office world, there needs to be equally compelling alternate solutions (open source or not).
If not anything, this thinking from Microsoft is worth for all BI practitioners to consider — and see the demo. We may not agree with the exact tools used, but the use case, or the scenario, of a knowledge worker finding the data/information they need, analyzing it in an intuitive fashion, and publishing it for their peers to see — that’s a key part of what we’re all trying to solve. And unless we make it utterly easy and painless, we still have a long way to go.
October 17th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
In my experience with several BI platforms, both commercial and open source, one of the most used feature turns out to be “export to Excel”. So, try as we may, there are valid reasons to cater towards a BI user’s natural flow of anlayzing data, and let them get their data into Excel.
And in that sense, Microsoft’s approach may have its merit in looking at Excel as the piece in the front and center for self service BI. Of course, calling it “democratization” maybe far fetched because this democracy will only be true in the Microsoft Office world, but it is a pretty big world of BI users. And for those who would like to stay far away from the Microsoft Office world, there needs to be equally compelling alternate solutions (open source or not).
If not anything, this thinking from Microsoft is worth for all BI practitioners to consider — and see the demo. We may not agree with the exact tools used, but the use case, or the scenario, of a knowledge worker finding the data/information they need, analyzing it in an intuitive fashion, and publishing it for their peers to see — that’s a key part of what we’re all trying to solve. And unless we make it utterly easy and painless, we still have a long way to go.