A lot of the experience that I had at Microsoft as a product manager that I have tried to seed into this blog and into TechProdo comes from my time working closely with a colleague, Daniel Yu. I even have a link on our home page http://www.techprodo.com to our TDWI article for BI Review on Customer Segmentation.
After I moved on to Oracle, Daniel moved over to the SQL Server Analysis Services team to focus on the Gemini Project, which will be released with Office 2010 as part of the PowerPivot capability. I’ve been following his work and put a link on our home page in the news section as part of our continuing coverage of Microsoft product releases and Office 2010 in particular. Interestingly, now that I am in Oracle and working on solutions with Oracle BI and Hyperion, it is interesting to note that the Hyperion financial solutions team will no longer have to worry about Microsoft PerformancePoint Server’s prebuilt financial BI capabilities since that has been axed.
Much of the work that we focused on in Microsoft over those past couple of years is being melded into Office 2010 functionality such as BI reporting capabilities into SharePoint, in-memory BI capabilities (ala QlikTech http://www.qliktech.com) and MDM. But if you have interest, as I do, in BI and analytics and would like to follow along with Microsoft’s PowerPivot product, here are some good links to read more:
The Excel team’s blog about PowerPivot
Read here about the way Microsoft uses common business tools like Office to create comfort for users who are leery about business intelligence as a technology. This is a common problem encountered by Microsoft in both the database and BI product teams. If you target hardcore database, BI or analytics users, they are often times hardened SAS, Oracle or IBM users.
