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The key issue encountered by enterprises adopting Business Intelligence (BI) is the integration of all their data sources within their organization says Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India. She speaks to Ashwani Mishra on Microsoft’s positioning in the BI space and also trends and challenges encountered in deployments.
 What are the trends in the BI space apart from the ongoing consolidations that we are seeing in the market?
From a trend perspective, BI has become more pervasive. Last year, BI was reserved only for the top management and company executives for high level and high impact decision making. Today, BI has transcended organizational barriers and come down to every level in the organization in different types of roles that include operational and tactical marketing type roles.
The second trend with BI is that it is starting to go down market. By this we mean that earlier we were seeing BI usage only in large organizations. But today even the mid-market or the SMB segment is keen to adopt it and they think that they could get a good return on investment (RoI) from BI.
Also, BI is penetrating across all verticals. Earlier there was a concentration in only financial and telecom sectors.
How is Microsoft positioned in the BI space in terms of solution/product offerings?
We have two different businesses within Microsoft that impacts BI. On the infrastructure side we have SQL Server 2005 and then we have Information Worker Business which caters to office and reporting applications. The BI portfolio and product per say is split between these two businesses.
On the infrastructure side the lead product is SQL Server 2005 and within SQL Server 2005 we have a comprehensive set of tools from a platform perspective. We have integration services that have capabilities like extract, transform and (ETL). Data mart and data warehouse capabilities are a part of the core engine of the SQL server.
In addition we have a SQL server analysis service which has OLAP and data mining capabilities. We also have a SQL server reporting service which is again a part of the core SQL server.
From the information worker side of the business we concentrate around the front ends that are required to deliver the right information, in the right format and at the right time.
Excel forms the key front end. We have Excel services on the server side that is a part of SharePoint. We also rely on SharePoint for the delivery of analytical information like publishing scorecards and reports as a portal engine.
Also we have a new business area called as the Office Business Applications from our acquisition of ProClarity. We are also working around Performance Point Server 2007 which incorporates business scorecard, analytical work, drilling down, drilling and slicing.
We provide the entire stack of a one vendor that is pre-integrated. For example SharePoint and SQL are pre-integrated. On the development side we have integrated the entire portfolio with visual studio. So a business user can create his own reports, use metadata that is published on top of SQL and then run it on SharePoint which would enable any user in the enterprise to view the information.
It is an end to end integrated portfolio. With a quick RoI and that provides flexibility.
What are the challenges in BI implementation and how can they be overcome?
The key issues encountered by enterprises going for BI is the integration of all the data sources in their organization. They need to take a stock of all the data they have in the organization and how the data needs to be used.
The second key challenge that they run into is business requirements of the different types of users and their needs from the various data sources.
A BI implementation is typically a four to six month process. If there are changes in requirement during the deployment phase you need to incorporate them on the fly.
The other key challenge is that there are not many good system integration partners skilled in implementing BI in a cost effective way.
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