Beneath the Radar

Even in BI, Microsoft's "attack from below" strategy is paying off

Considering its propensity for making a big splash, I'm amazed by how low-key Microsoft can be when it wants to.

If the Israeli newspaper daily Ha'aretz hadn't reported a news leak on June 21, months might have passed before we were aware that the company had acquired Israeli online analytic processing (OLAP) startup Maximal Innovative Intelligence. Even Microsoft's July 10 announcement that it will release a new product for desktop data analysis - which company representatives confirmed to me will be based on Maximal technology - was silent about the acquisition, possibly to antagonize Microsoft partners as little as possible. (The product, Desktop Data Analyzer, will have Office XP branding but will not ship in the Office box. At press time, pricing details were still unknown.) The Maximal URL quietly went dead shortly after the leak.

As an interesting coincidence, the last time Microsoft looked to Tel Aviv for intellectual property in the business intelligence (BI) space was in 1996, when it purchased the Panorama Software Systems OLAP engine to serve as the technology foundation for OLAP Services (now called Analysis Services in its SQL Server 2000 incarnation). Apparently, Israel is now ground zero for developers who grasp the utility of OLAP and data visualization technology for garden-variety business users.

BACK AT THE OFFICE

Interestingly, Microsoft Office lead product manager John Vail told me that his group initiated the acquisition, not the SQL Server business intelligence team. He and BI lead product manager John Eng characterize the acquisition as a "tactical" one; Maximal is a small company, and all its customers are inherently already part of the SQL Server installed base. (The Maximal client, Max, was designed specifically for the OLAP Services platform.) Although Max already has a highly graphical and rather unique interface, Vail and Eng surprised me by saying that they would like to see it become even more graphical - a true OLAP client for the masses.

Publicly, Microsoft is still adhering closely to its platform-for-partners mantra and Max is a relatively low-end product, so the news for ISVs is probably good in the short term. But the fact that Microsoft may get millions of customers hooked on using an OLAP tool that will let them publish their analyses via Office XP applications such as Excel or PowerPoint, the dominant means for workgroup productivity worldwide, can't be good news in the long run for such companies - many of which fled the platform business a few years ago with the release of OLAP Services.

As reported in InformationWeek (July 11), Microsoft partner ProClarity has decried this distributed, thick-client approach as antithetical to the traditionally centralized nature of real-world BI processes. But Microsoft is not alone in its single-user vision: At least one other company, WhiteLight Systems Inc., has released a product of its own, Analyst Desktop, that professes to "bridge the gap between enterprise analytics and spreadsheets" for individual users.

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If we are to take these developments at face value, a potentially significant new mass market is developing literally under the noses of the enterprise BI vendors, which have put years into developing Web front ends so that nonexpert users can enjoy the fruits of high-end analytics. Thus far, only thick-client apostle Microsoft can plausibly claim to have brought BI into the business-user mainstream.

FORGING AHEAD

The addition of Maximal technology to Microsoft's BI portfolio - and no less important, the growing coordination between the SQL Server/BI and Office groups - indicate that the company is well on its way to making Office XP a BI environment with real value for rank-and-file decision makers. Its next task will be to "close the loop" between analytics and operations, a difficult problem on which it has expended little effort, and to successfully marry its BI and .Net visions.