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Archive for the ‘PerformancePoint’ Category

PerformancePoint Planning – Back from the Dead!

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Here’s the official announcement from http://www.microsoft.com/bi/partners/default.aspx :

Financial Planning Accelerator

Microsoft is pleased to make available the Financial Planning Accelerator (FPA). The FPA is source code and project files derived from the PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning module. Based on requests from customers and partners, we are making this code available on a no-cost, individual license.
This is unsupported source code that customers and partners can use to support or change PerformancePoint Server Planning functionality. Derived object code files can be distributed to end users with Microsoft SharePoint Server Enterprise Client Access Licenses. To obtain access to the FPA a license agreement between Microsoft and the customer or partner is required. After that agreement is in place, download instructions will be made available.
Please e-mail fpasupp@microsoft.com to request the agreement.

It’s not exactly open source, but it does mean that the partners who were hit hardest when PerformancePoint Planning was killed off can now get their hands on the source code, modify it and sell it on to their customers so long as those customers have the right Sharepoint licences. The question is now, will anyone take Microsoft up on this offer?

Written by Chris Webb

June 18, 2009 at 12:50 pm

Posted in PerformancePoint

More thoughts on the death of PPS Planning

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I’ve just seen a copy of the PerformancePoint announcement, and it makes interesting reading. Peter Koller’s blog entry that I pointed to in my previous post has all the main points and a very good analysis, but there are some other things I’d like to pick up on…

First of all, a classic bit of PR "let’s put a positive spin on this":
These changes enable customers to deploy a complete BI solution with existing investments in SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Excel, the most widely used analysis and planning tool in market today.

LOL, after all that time spent telling us we should move away from Excel hell we now find that the death of PerformancePoint Planning means we’re now free to go back to Excel!

Performance management is a critical component of business intelligence and Microsoft will continue marketing and R&D investment in this area in future product releases.

How you interpret this depends on what ‘performance management’ means. Some people have speculated that MS are planning to acquire a replacement for PPS Planning but I doubt this. As I said yesterday, could Gemini be somehow used as a planning tool? Gemini would certainly help make doing planning in Excel faster but you really need a dedicated app to manage the planning process properly surely? I think MS are simply abandoning this space.

The core ProClarity capabilities that made that product successful will migrate to SharePoint and Excel over the coming releases. As for Business Scorecard Manager and ProClarity Desktop Pro, we don’t anticipate any further customer demand for this.

Everyone had already guessed that Microsoft’s BI fat-client consisted solely of Excel, but this confirms it. Personally I think they’re wrong in thinking that there’s no customer demand for a tool like Proclarity Desktop Pro – Excel 2007 is good but has some serious limitations as a high-end client for Analysis Services, and I doubt the next version of Excel will do everything power users want either (and let’s face it it’s going to be years and years before most organisations even think about migrating to Excel 14!).

It would be good to have a clear statement of Microsoft’s future BI strategy now, if only so that partners can work out what they should and shouldn’t invest in. I’ve already talked about how the uncertainty caused by the Proclarity acquisition has actively damaged the third-party client tools market and in turn reduced choice for customers and made the MS BI platform less attractive. The same thing goes for planning: everyone in BI knows that this is a highly lucrative market to be in – if it wasn’t, MS wouldn’t have entered it in the first place. But PerformancePoint Planning killed off most of the ecosystem of planning and budgeting applications that used the MS BI platform, such as tools like Enterprise Reporting that MS had acquired, or Outlooksoft which sold itself to SAP (I assume the product still exists, but I’ve not heard much of it since). And now Planning itself is dead, what’s left? And what partner will want to bet on this area again?

Written by Chris Webb

January 23, 2009 at 10:47 am

Posted in PerformancePoint

So, farewell then PerformancePoint Planning

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Obviously the big news today was the job cuts at Microsoft, but in the BI area there was also the significant announcement that PerformancePoint Planning is being killed and Monitoring and Analytics will be rolled into the Sharepoint team:
http://performancepointinsider.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2009/01/22/just-call-me-performancepoint-services.aspx
(I’ll add more links later when I can find some!)

All I can say is thank goodness I never spent any time learning Planning (more through laziness/luck than judgement); my sympathy goes out to people who did. Why have MS done this? I always had my doubts about the architecture of Planning, but like everyone else I assumed MS would get it right in the long term. Perhaps now MS have decided they can’t afford to spend years developing products that only become successful after a few years. Perhaps the future is Gemini? Who knows…

UPDATE: the link above seems to be down at the moment, but I’ve had the news confirmed from other sources. And here’s Peter Koller with more details:
http://peterkol.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!68755AEAC31F9A6C!992.entry

UPDATE: some more links:
http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!CD3E77E793DF6178!893.entry
http://beyondbi.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/performancepoint-terminated-some-more-facts/

I’ve also heard that FRx is going to be dusted down and developed further. If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of FRx and PPS Planning, see:
http://alanwhitehouse.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/performancepoint-planning-vs-frx-forecaster/#more-353

Written by Chris Webb

January 22, 2009 at 4:17 pm

Posted in PerformancePoint

PerformancePoint release date

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David Francis has the scoop on the release date for PerformancePoint:
http://blogs.conchango.com/davidfrancis/archive/2007/07/21/PerformancePoint-RTM-and-GA-dates.aspx
Apparently RTM will be sometime in September.

Written by Chris Webb

July 21, 2007 at 9:46 pm

Posted in PerformancePoint

PerformancePoint First Impressions

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I was meant to be at the third day of the UK PerformancePoint airlift today, but because of the snow we’ve been having here in the south of England I decided against the trip to Reading and stayed at home to build a snowman instead. However, I thought I’d go ahead and blog about what I learnt on the first two days; Charlie Maitland was/is also there and has also been blogging too, here and here. It seems like the PerformancePoint hype cycle is getting up to speed – there’s certainly a lot about it in the press, eg at twdi http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8313 - so I might as well add my thoughts…
 
First of all, what is PerformancePoint anyway? It’s really two separate things: first of all there’s the monitoring and analytics stuff, which is partly the next version of Business Scorecard Manager, partly the server-based dashboard, analytics etc components that came with the Proclarity acquisition; there’s also the budgeting and planning, ‘business performance management’, application which was codenamed Biz#. Initially I was a bit confused about why all this was being bundled into one product: I can see that the people using the bpm functionality will want to use the monitoring and analytics functionality, but the vast majority of the people using the latter will be people upgrading from the old Proclarity components (or moving away from equivalents like Panorama) and won’t have much direct interest in the bpm side of things. However I suspect that this is another case of Microsoft doing some clever bundling. The companies who are getting their dashboards/scorecards for a reasonable price (and the price is very reasonable, $20000 per server plus $195 per CAL) will suddenly find they’ve got this bpm application thrown in and decide to give it a try, in the same way that many companies came to Analysis Services because they got it free with SQL Server.
 
The course itself was almost all to do with the bpm functionality, with only a few demos of the dashboards and scorecards, so for the rest of this post I’ll just be talking about the bpm functionality. So, then, the key question… is it any good? Do we like it? Of course it’s impossible to say how good or bad a product is going to be based on an early CTP, but in general I was quite impressed. A lot of thought has obviously gone into it and it will definitely be a better option that trying to build your own financial application using Analysis Services. I wish I had some experience with other similar products, especially some of the better-established AS-based competitors like Outlooksoft, to be able to make a comparison but I don’t; I doubt that most people who evaluate or go on to use PerformancePoint will be judging it against its competitors though and I’m sure that as a V1.0 it’s missing a lot of the features that they have.
 
Down sides? At the moment the UI is a bit of a disaster, more VB4 than Office 2007 in terms of look and feel and usability, and a lot of work is going to have to be done before the September release in this area. There’s also, in my opinion, a tendency to use parent/child hierarchies rather too much (though admittedly many hierarchies in financial applications have to be modelled as parent/childs) and I would be worried about the performance implications of this although the program managers present at the course did say that the AS dev team had implemented some changes in SP2 which will mitigate this. Kristian Wedberg also made some valid points about the lack of support for integrating existing cubes and dimensions into a new PerformancePoint application which I fully agree with: at the moment you have to build every dimension measure group from scratch but realistically if you already have an AS-based application you’re going to want to reuse dimensions and measures from it, probably using linked objects.
 
There’s also something of a tension apparent in the design, stemming from the intent that non-technical users should be able to do as much of the work of creating and maintaining a PerformancePoint application as possible. If I recall this was always what Nigel Pendse liked about Applix TM1 in his reviews in the OLAP Report, so it’s a valid goal, but as always there are some things that are best left to technical people. The parent/child hierarchy issue is a case in point: after I had raised the question I had a good discussion from one of the guys there from Solver, a partner who has been doing a lot of work with PerformancePoint, and he said that to get around the problems associated with large parent/child hierarchies they’d found that they needed to break up the dimensions into smaller pieces and only add the relevant pieces to models/cubes. Now this is a perfectly valid answer and indeed PerformancePoint makes it easy to do just this, but it’s something that a business user should never be expected to know about or understand despite the fact that dimension design is a task that the UI wants to make easy for business users. Similarly, there’s the option to populate your dimensions either manually by typing in member names or by loading data from a csv file, both of which can be done by a non-technical user through the UI, or by pushing the data directly into the staging db using something like SSIS, clearly a technical person’s task and by far the most robust option. My feeling is that the division of tasks between those that can be done by a non-technical user and those that can’t could have been made better and that if, say, the model design tasks had been implemented in Visual Studio à la BIDS for the techies and just the maintenance and day-to-day management had been left for the non-techies in a separate UI, the product would have been stronger. But I understand that’s a contentious opinion and that this feeling is based on a very limited knowledge of the product and financial applications in general, so I might change my mind…
 
I don’t want to dwell on the negatives too much anyway, which I know I’m inclined to do, because as I say my overall impression was favourable and we’re still about six months from RTM. Before going on the training I thought that the bpm side of PerformancePoint would be something I might steer clear of in my day-to-day work, but now I feel enthused to go out there and do something with it. There’s a healthy amount of MDX used in its calculations and reporting so that has to represent a business opportunity for me!
 
 

Written by Chris Webb

February 8, 2007 at 3:43 pm

Posted in PerformancePoint

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