Today was the third and last day of the first ever (as Alex Payne likes to say it..) Microsoft Business Intelligence conference.

It’s been quite an interesting week and an eye-opener for me, as I discover the features and possibilities of PerformancePoint Server 2007. Last night I downloaded the CTP2 of PPS and started playing with it. I was afraid that the learning path would be quite high, but in the end, it turned out to be more approachable than I thought. I yet have to play with the budgeting and planning side of it, which I anticipate will be a little harder to grasp. I encourage people interested in dashboards and scorecards to really have a look at PPS Monitoring & Analytics, it is worth the time it took to download..

Anyway, back to the conference. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, was on stage to talk about the place of BI in the software industry and emphasize two messages:

• Microsoft is very serious about entering this market
• Microsoft’s goal is “BI for the masses”. Democratizing BI with high-power, yet easy-to-use software components.

I liked his idea of presenting the world of personal productivity and the world of IT systems, with most of the improvements being done in between. The role of BI, as Microsoft sees it, it to make it easier for users to use their tools of personal productivity (world where they are comfortable) to navigate and analyze information extracted from IT systems. He also mentioned BI applications used internally at Microsoft, and frankly, I would have loved to see a demo of one of these systems.

He then outlined what he sees as the future for BI:

• Self-service, transparent
• Embedded BI
• Guided analytics (to bubble up exceptions, outliers, potential problems)
• New BI models to help drive business

His formal talk was only 30 minutes, and I wished it had been a little longer. I love Steve’s style, he is energetic and passionate about what he’s talking about. But today was probably not one of his best speeches, although the little he had to say, I found it interesting.

The rest of his time was spent on Q&A with Chris Caren, General Manager in the Office Business Applications division. I did not write down all the questions, but here are a few of them:

Q: Role of Microsoft Office in the future?

A: Office needs to migrate to a software+services world. We have the ribbon, but we need to make the UI even more approachable. Office needs to be more integrated with business and server offerings.

A: Microsoft will continue to invest with SAP as a duet. There will be Microsoft solutions, SAP solutions and duets with combined Microsoft/SAP solutions. Microsoft will continue on making platforms interoperable.

Q: Changes in the industry and consolidation. Is this a good thing for customers/partners?

A: It’s the natural evolution of the business. There are three tiers of companies (pillars, large and small) and it’s a natural evolution to have consolidation between tiers.

Q: BI to create new service offerings?

A: BI is a huge opportunity in that space (example given in the financial services world, where a company can offer BI services to its partners/suppliers/vendors)

Q: What about BI as a service?

A: There are lots of things going on at Microsoft in the collaboration/communication area. BI as a service is also a huge opportunity for smaller businesses to get their hands on forecasting, budgeting and planning tools.

After Steve Ballmer’s keynote session, I headed to Donald Farmer’s talk on “Data Mining: A Platform for Intelligent Applications”. I was surprised to see that many people at a talk on data mining (hall 6E was 80% full). It may have to do with a more restricted selection of talks to choose from, but more likely, I think the subject has started to take off and resonate with customers. In my consulting engagements over the last year, I have picked more and more requests for data mining presentations.

Donald’s presentation was great and the demos he chose were right on the spot.

He first started by reminding the audience that data mining is not a single product offering from Microsoft, but rather a platform on which people can build intelligent applications, which are, according to his definition, applications that learn from the past and can respond to new information.

It was interesting to see the show of hands when he asked how many people in the audience were pure data miners. Only one person raised his hand. The rest of the audience was primarily composed of BI developers. This speaks volumts about the untapped potential that we have with this data mining platform.

After talking about the CRISP-DM process model (Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining) and showing how the Microsoft DM technology can be mapped to the various steps in the model, he moved on to show his first demo: Build a model to predict if someone could be a home owner, based on # of children, # of cars owned and yearly income. Somewhat the canonical demo for DM, but interesting though. The nice part was the introduction to DMX (the DM query language) to create, train and use data mining models (this is where I discovered natural prediction JOINs).

The next demo was a form entry validation demo, where the entries in a form are passed to a data mining algorithm for validation. This one was an interesting use of data mining. We often associate DM with prediction and some kind of magic algorithm, but this data validation demo provided a strong case for use of DM in existing customer environments. I showed very appropriately the use of prediction probability, not only to determine whether an entry is wrong, but also how wrong we think it is. I’ll definitely have to build that demo on my laptop…

To finish this very short half-day of the conference, I sat in the “Building BI solutions with Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Analysis Services 2005” session. T.K. Anand, Program Manager in the AS2005 team and Allan Folting, PM in Excel co-hosted this session. As a consultant on Microsoft BI technologies, the subject of this talk fell right into the heart of my current skills. Therefore, I did not learn anything, but nevertheless found the talk well articulated and fun to watch. T.K. and Allan perfectly played their parts and it turned out quite entertaining, as any well-rehearsed presentation should be. The talk was mostly a big huge demo that they kept building on, showing most personalization features of AS2005. Among the topics covered were:

• Pivot table styles
• Server-side filtering
• Display of member properties
• Contextual filters
• Date filters
• Translation of data and metadata
• Perspectives
• Calculations
• Set creation
• Actions and Drillthrough
• Server side formatting and guided analysis
• KPIs
• OLAP tools and Intellisense on cube formulas

This is just on top of my head as I did not take notes towards the end of the session, but I encourage people to watch the demo on the conference DVD. It pretty much covers all personalization features of AS2005 that can be exposed in Excel 2007 and makes a compelling argument for tying the client piece (Excel 2007) with the server piece (AS2005). To all who are thinking of using Excel 2003 as the analytic client, have a look at what Excel 2007 has to offer!

This session concluded the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference. For a 1^st shot, I think it was pretty good. Of course, there are tons of things that can be improved to reach the level of more established conferences like TechEd or DevDays, but the few discussions I’ve had on the floor with customers seem to show a great momentum for the Microsoft BI platform and I am sure the organizers will take the time to digest the feedback and bring us something breath taking for next year! I am really looking forward to receiving the conference DVD in a couple of weeks, so that I can watch the sessions I couldn't go to (like "Diagnosing AS2005 MDX query performance bottlenecks" or "Behind the scenes with PerformancePoint Business Planner Calculations" or "Real-world Microsoft BI implementations: Lessons learned the hard way" to mention only a few of them..)

I now have a couple of hours before flying back to Paris then I’m taking a week off, so take care and have a safe trip back if you’re also flying home!

-- Patrice.