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Microsoft enters business intelligence market with acquisition |
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by Stan Beer
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Wednesday, 05 April 2006 |
Software kingpin Microsoft is said to be causing a stir in the business intelligence (BI) software community with the acquisition of one of its partners Proclarity.
Proclarity, a privately held company, provides analysis and
visualisation tools which run on a Microsoft platform. Described as a
highly significant move by Microsoft, analyst groups, such as Ovum,
predict the acquisition will cause ripples across the BI market, among
companies such as Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, who previously
did not have to compete with an end-to-end offering from the likes of a
Microsoft.
According to Ovum, "The BI pure-play vendors are always aware of the
shadow of the enterprise software vendors, and keep a close eye on the
big four of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. On the Microsoft front, the
acquisition of ProClarity's mature, robust, user front-end software is
the one they will have been dreading most. The gap in the front end of
Microsoft's platform has pushed it out of a number of deals for a long
time, as Microsoft typically provided beefy server tools (database,
OLAP server, programming languages) at the back end, with toolkits
(Reporting Services) to build front ends. This approach worked well,
with Microsoft shops employing developers, or companies prepared to use
an additional partner as well as Microsoft, but for many organisations
it left too many unknowns and too much development. Adding the
ProClarity functionality to Microsoft's core server-based offering
immediately puts it in a like-for-like race with Business Objects,
Cognos and Hyperion in terms of front-end functionality, with the
advantage of a perceived greater level of standardisation, as the
company provides a wider range of software in terms of its database and
its .NET programming architecture."
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