Although most financial services institutions have made inroads into Business Intelligence (BI), there still is some way to go before the full promise of BI is fulfilled and it is embedded in the enterprise, used by all relevant employees. Microsoft for its part is doing everything it can to speed this process up. Its fast track: Excel.

Excel, used by a large portion of what Microsoft estimates are 500 million company users who have Office licenses, enables Microsoft to deliver pervasive BI and Performance Management to everyone at a fraction of the cost of other BI tools.

To make BI ever-present, Microsoft has BI sitting natively inside Excel. As Tom Hagerty of AMR Research explains in a briefing on the company’s BI strength, “Microsoft considers much of its BI/PM strategy as an expansion of its Office applications franchise…. As an extension of Office, BI capabilities are delivered inherently. Coupled with the rest of the Microsoft infrastructure, the strategy gains more credibility. When BI/PM is priced like office productivity software, the economic model can radically change.”

Microsoft’s BI architecture consists of the BI Platform (SQL Server), the end-user tools and performance management applications (Excel, PerformancePoint Server 2007) and the information delivery layer (SharePoint Server 2007). SQL Server 2008 will include capabilities for more analytic capabilities as well as more value-added integration functionality.

The system takes advantage of all the capabilities of a platform and is not restricted by arbitrary boundaries of existing products, says Hagerty. “The unifying piece – SharePoint Server – is the hidden gem in the Microsoft BI/PM strategy,” he says.

This is significant for financial institutions. “Microsoft is driving a new economic model for BI, and ubiquitous BI will become a key component of role-based productivity for financial institutions, driving deeper customer knowledge, improved risk management and compliance, and more effective global operations,” says Brian Jackson, Microsoft’s Worldwide Financial Services Technology Strategist for Banking in his interview with Windows in Financial Services (p. 26).

The company has been working on BI since at least February 2003 when it set its BI foundation with its launch of Microsoft Reporting Services. It has since then been occupied with core development, strategic acquisitions, and integration of distinct product lines to be able to offer users a comprehensive solution. Its recent acquisition of SoftArtisans, a company that develops Microsoft Office format reporting and file transfer software for managed report authoring in Office, adds relational data strength. See WFS’ interview with Soft­Artisans’ CEO David Wihl (p. 28). Microsoft’s partnership with Corporate Modelling bolsters its analytic infrastructure as Corporate Modelling founder and chief architect Graham Twaddle explains in his interview with WFS (p. 29).

“Microsoft has developed, assembled, and is launching a formidable BI/PM strategy that will change market dynamics during the next 24 to 36 months,” says Hagerty. He predicts Excel integration to soon become standard for BI platforms.

• Microsoft: One Step Closer to Making Business Intelligence Ubiquitous
• SoftArtisans OfficeWriter: Bridging the Gap between Microsoft Office and SQL Server
• Corporate Modeling: Adding Analytics to BI