7 October 2008

The conference was held at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, Seattle

Microsoft kicked off its second annual Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2008 by announcing new technologies that will enable enterprises to bring business intelligence (BI) to information workers organisation-wide.

The company introduced new managed self-service analysis capabilities code-named Project Gemini, and self-service reporting capabilities upcoming in the next release of Microsoft SQL Server, which focused on BI — code-named Kilimanjaro.

“Microsoft’s goal is to transform the way companies think of BI through familiar and intuitive business-friendly tools that help them unlock the power of BI across their organisations,” said Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division. “If you know how to use Word and Excel, then you’ll be able to use our BI – that’s our commitment to customers.”

Kilimanjaro will include a set of analysis tools for managed self-service that will enable information workers to create their own BI applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.

If you know how to use Word and Excel, then you’ll be able to use our BI – that’s our commitment to customers

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division Microsoft also demonstrated a new solution, Madison, which is designed to deliver increased scalability and is capable of supporting the very largest data warehousing deployments. The solution, which will integrate technology from recently acquired data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro, will handle such data warehousing workloads and will be available to customers through a CTP within the next 12 months.

Additionally, the acquisition of data quality vendor, Zoomix, will provide data quality capabilities in future versions of SQL Server, enabling customers to maximise the accuracy of their BI. Microsoft is working with industry-leading server and storage hardware providers including Bull, Dell, EMC, HP and Unisys to build a strong ecosystem providing an ‘appliance-like’ buying experience for customers based on the Madison solution.

Add a comment