The Magic of BI

September 28, 2006 from SQL Server Magazine – “According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, 2006 report (published September 12), Microsoft’s BI platform revenue grew at a rate of 35.9 percent in 2005. And Microsoft’s recent earnings reports (http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/default.mspx) document that Microsoft SQL Server revenue as a whole also grew 35 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2006. In Microsoft’s press release about its BI growth (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/sep06/09-22BIMomentumPR.mspx), Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, says:

“Our ongoing BI investments are enabling a transformation of the way people interact with important business information. We continue to evolve our solution set, recently rounding it out with an integrated performance management application, such that our offering will provide customers with a complete, flexible and cost-effective BI solution, one that enables truly pervasive BI across the enterprise.”

Those of you familiar with Gartner’s magic quadrant model know that it breaks vendors into four categories: niche player, challenger, visionary, or leader. Garner assigns a vendor’s standing in the quadrant based on the vendor’s completeness of vision and ability to execute that vision. Gartner’s recent magic quadrant report shows that Microsoft has made great progress across the board in data warehousing and is now on the line between challenger and leader.”


180 View – Here is another indicator of Business Intelligence becoming part of the end-to-end strategy of ERP vendors. Microsoft has a huge advantage over many of its rivals, and will exploit this advantage over the years to come.