I’m sure you all know by now that I’m prone to the odd bout of wild speculation, and here comes another one… A new flavour of Office has been announced, Office Ultimate. See
for more details. As this article says, it’s pricey and MS will need to offer new functionality to justify that price tag. Now we know that it’s the Office group that have bought Proclarity and what I’m thinking is that the Proclarity fat client tool would fit nicely into Office Ultimate as exactlly that kind of justification: $679 per licence is cheap when you think of what companies have been paying for BI client tools like Proclarity up to now (and you get Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc thrown in!), plus its inclusion will drive sales of SQL Server and the other Office BI apps like BSM and (perhaps) the forthcoming Biz#. Hmm… let’s wait and see…
Chris,
Not sure about this one. ProClarity is going to sit as part of Bill Baker\’s OBA team which, despite the name, is a different department to Office.
There\’s a webcast on Tuesday from the OBA team outlining their product roadmap and doubtless ProClarity will get mentioned.
-Jamie
Is this a public webcast? If so, I don\’t suppose you could send me a link, could you?
I definitley see ProClarity as part of the next big Office relese. I think that they will at least integrate some kind of ProClarity thin-client into Excel.