Thursday, December 23, 2010

BI Seminar - Microstrategy BI Tools

Last Friday, I invited the "Microstrategy" to present a session based on their BI tools, to students from two different master degrees classes and also some BI passionate friends.
I confess that I didn’t have a very a good opinion about Microstrategy. But since some months ago, I surrendered to their products quality not for my own experience with the tools, but mainly by the market opinion and for the amazing staff that Microstrategy Portugal currently has.

Related to market opinion, Microstrategy is for Gartner, one of the world BI leaders. Mainly after this session, I truly believe on it, but BI is more than that… there is a huge work that BI should do to became a successful system. And because we are talking about tools... an ETL tool to extract, transform and load operational data into BI system is a critical step where almost projects in average spend 70% of the time. A BI system has a huge pillar on technology, but is required to be aligned with strategy, with business processes and with the people which almost the times resist to the change.

Related to the Microstrategy Portuguese staff, they are very kindly and always available to be in touch with the master degrees that I collaborate as assistant teacher. They are amazing and I’m sure that they make the difference in an increasingly competitive BI world.

The session was very interesting and concerning to the Microstrategy tools I highlight the big flexibility to create a dashboard, and also the huge performance that seemed to have! Also the dashboard showed directly in IPAD was wonderful!

The feedback from the audience was very positive... I highlight the following:

Take a look at this video to better imagine what was included on this seminar
Thanks again to Daniel and Carla from Microstrategy Portugal!

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

BI Tools – Microsoft Project Crescent

During the PASS Summit, Microsoft announced the launch of the community technology preview (CTP) of SQL Server 11, codename “Denali”. Unfortunately, this version doesn’t have yet almost BI functionalities promised by Microsoft. Only at the end of 2011 these functionalities will be available to try!

But for now, I’m very excited to see codenamed Project “Crescent” (entirely developed on Silverlight) available to try and test! Microsoft already have cool BI front-end tools, although
it’s required a tool that gathers all the functionalities dispersed by these several tools in only one. Right now, we can explore information inside a Data Warehouse or OLAP Database, through very good tools like: Excel, Visio, Report Builder, Reporting Services, Power Pivot (Excel Add-in)… but Project Crescent is a hope that an amazing visualizing world is coming soon… I hope not be disappointed, but on 2011 we all see and prove!


If you want to download the SQL Server Denali CTP, follow this
link
Regards, Pedro

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...