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Blog: Colin White« Report from Gartner BI Conference | Main | Netezza and Celequest Heat up the DW and BI Appliance Marketplace » Microsoft Aggressively Extends its Move into BI by Acquiring ProClarityMicrosoft's announcement that they have agreed to acquire ProClarity clearly demonstrates that Microsoft is getting very serious about Business Intelligence. ProClarity has been a Microsoft partner for many years and has a strong BI following on the Microsoft operating platform. The acquisition adds some powerful development and end-user capabilities to the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 products announced last year. The Microsoft BI solution will get a further boost next January when Microsoft delivers additional BI capabilities with Office 2007. The drive by MIcrosoft into the BI market has significant implications for third-party vendors in this space, e.g., Business Objects and Cognos.
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Comments
Perhaps Microsoft has recognised that whilst it has provided a cost effective BI solution for quite some time, the majority of potential customers didn't expect to have to build quite so much of the infrastructure necessary to deliver it?
But at what cost? ProClarity is very good at delivery, but will Microsoft's current customer base be prepared to pay for the benefits that ProClarity brings?
In the UK, I frequently find that organisations have Microsoft SQL Server as their database platform, but they simply hadn't realised that it includes a compentent BI platform!
So are all those Microsoft partners now going to become experts in BI in addition to CRM? And will Microsoft's customers actually benefit?
Posted by: David Willis | April 13, 2006 9:18 AM
Anyone hear a price for this acquisition? Were they dying or growing fast enough to matter?
Posted by: Tong XUe | April 16, 2006 12:18 PM
The ProClarity acquisition is a savvy move by Microsoft to integrate BI functionality into its platform. This will surely apply increased pressure to the traditional BI players, who have been struggling to add more advanced capabilities to their reporting platforms. With Microsoft making BI more of a commodity, the traditional BI players will be forced to look elsewhere for differentiation. If marketing hype is any indication, BI players will try to pursue the analytics space for this -- although they’ll find that their platforms were architected for reporting optimization and dashboards, not analytics. Existing vendors in the analytics space, however, are well poised to take advantage of the solid BI foundation Microsoft is building.
Ultimately, I think customers will win as the industry now moves to create BI 2.0, which will not be just about pulling together and reporting data, but rather in delivering insights.
Posted by: Dylan Cotter | April 17, 2006 12:14 PM