Looks like MS is making sure they cover both the front & the backend of the BI solution space, First the release of SQL 2005,which has a formidable BI stack and thier intelligence front-end tools (Office based) seems to a pretty exciting options to the users.

-"Microsoft OLAP is the king of OLAP products as far as I am concerned," he says-and also commends SSIS, which he says is so different from DTS as to not merit a comparison. Reporting Services, on the other hand, still needs some work-particularly with respect to its multidimensional reporting capabilities. "Reporting services still has issues in terms of easy report generations, especially multi-dimensional; it also suffers from not having an interface that is any good for end users to develop their own reports." - Chris Brandsma, a senior programmer and analyst with services and application development specialist Tree Top Technology

On the ProClarity (recent acquisition by MS) front "ProClarity... has also stagnated in the past few years. I'm hoping Microsoft can pump some fresh blood into the product and bring it back the leadership role it had. This could easily be a win-win for consumers and BI professionals like myself by creating a more standard client platform to use, and giving customers more reassurance in picking, or staying with ProClarity, in the future," he comments, noting that Microsoft's PerformancePoint product is as much homegrown as it is based on ProClarity's middleware assets.

This raises questions about areas of overlap between Microsoft's Office-based BI tools approach and ProClarity's own front-end studio, ProClarity Desktop Professional. "Since PerformancePoint is now out in the open as a Web-based product using many of the features in the ProClarity Analysis Services, it will be more interesting to see what Microsoft does with ProClarity's desktop product and how/if that will interact with Office," concludes Brandsma.

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Prashanth Rai