Obviously the big news today was the job cuts at Microsoft, but in the BI area there was also the significant announcement that PerformancePoint Planning is being killed and Monitoring and Analytics will be rolled into the Sharepoint team:
http://performancepointinsider.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2009/01/22/just-call-me-performancepoint-services.aspx
(I’ll add more links later when I can find some!)
All I can say is thank goodness I never spent any time learning Planning (more through laziness/luck than judgement); my sympathy goes out to people who did. Why have MS done this? I always had my doubts about the architecture of Planning, but like everyone else I assumed MS would get it right in the long term. Perhaps now MS have decided they can’t afford to spend years developing products that only become successful after a few years. Perhaps the future is Gemini? Who knows…
UPDATE: the link above seems to be down at the moment, but I’ve had the news confirmed from other sources. And here’s Peter Koller with more details:
http://peterkol.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!68755AEAC31F9A6C!992.entry
UPDATE: some more links:
http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!CD3E77E793DF6178!893.entry
http://beyondbi.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/performancepoint-terminated-some-more-facts/
I’ve also heard that FRx is going to be dusted down and developed further. If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of FRx and PPS Planning, see:
http://alanwhitehouse.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/performancepoint-planning-vs-frx-forecaster/#more-353
Not sorry to see it go (although I am surprised). I tried to get my head around it once and to say it wasn\’t easy is an understatement.
Wonder how PerformancePoint will be licensed then – will it be like Excel Services, which requires Enterprise licensing for SharePoint? At the moment, only the "free" WSS version of SharePoint is required for the PerformancePoint monitoring server:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb821191.aspx – Deepak
Deepak, That is also my first question.
Hmm, no-one really seems sad about its demise at all. I think the basic problem is that while MS keeps making noises about selling \’solutions\’ they are essentially very bad at it. No direct contact between Redmond and customers; relatively small sales and services divisions (and reliance on partners instead) so no feedback from there; release cycles that are way too long so bugs never get fixed and new features never get added. MS is probably right to stick at the things they are good at, ie building platforms.
Seems like the original post at PerformancePointInsider has been deleted. Also, nothing on this in microsoft.com. Hoax or leak?
Chris – There\’s definitely a few of us who are sad at it\’s demise! In our (completely biased) opinion it was a pretty good product (and really not that hard Jamie!) which as you say had a few issues in it\’s architecture but were resolvable. I think one of the problems is that it revolved around business process – something that MS had never really tried before.No doubt a decision from some fat cat who looked at the first year numbers and pulled it.Hoax or leak – well of course no-one from MSFT has bothered to get in touch and let us know what we are supposed to tell our customer but we have had it unofficially confirmed by insiders
I\’ve had it confirmed from other sources too. But interesting that the blog entry has been pulled – maybe MS thought they wanted to manage the publicity better? It\’s too late now though…
Good riddance!