By now just about everybody who has anything to say about the killing-off of PPS Planning has blogged, so I thought I’d post up some links. The judgement seems to be that it’s hardly a surprise that it wasn’t successful and that even if they could have got the tech side of the product right, they didn’t have the means to sell it; on the other hand, the news that the surviving parts of PPS will be effectively free for Sharepoint customers is certainly going to be a positive move for its uptake – although it can also be seen as another blow for another set of partners, those who provide web-based SSAS client tools.
Anyhow, the links –
Nigel Pendse: http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_Bizdemise.htm
Johan Pellicaan: http://officeapplications.typepad.com/bridge/2009/01/microsoft-business-intelligence-changed-strategy-unclear.html
Mauro Cardarelli: http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2009/01/25/21394.aspx
The Panorama blog: http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=129
Cindi Howson: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2009/01/microsofts_big_1.html
The official word from the Microsoft BI Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/archive/2009/01/23/microsoft-bi-strategy-update.aspx
Cubegeek: http://cobb.typepad.com/cubegeek/2009/01/microsoft-pps-dead.html
Last of all, Andrew Wiles makes a very sensible suggestion here:
http://andrewwiles.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!43141EE7B38A8A7A!451.entry
Given that several partners and customers who were Planning early adopters have been pretty much [expletive deleted] by this move, why shouldn’t Microsoft open source it and make the code available somewhere like Codeplex? It would be a nice gesture.
I totally agree with you: MSFT should open source Planning. It would be very positive to third party developments and will enrich market offerings. I think that It will generate just the inverse effect than Proclarity acquisition did !.
Hi chris, i know, i am very late with my comment – but i have some other opriorities right now – our Company (Computacenter) has started an company wide SAP Introduction for all 3 countries – and i am the project lead for all of the datawarehouse stuff. That project is so big, that Mike Noris (our CEO) that announced to our stakeholders….Frrm my individually view the strategy is absolutely ok! I can not aggre with the most comments on the 3 articles – as i told you, i started with PPS last year , but: as you couldn\’t buy only the presentation part for the dashbords at last my vison brokes down about the costs! Planning is something for the elitist circle of controllers, maybe 10- 30 users in a company like ours, but: in our german company part at last approx. 2000! employees uses our DWH and the Cubes – so we make really BI for the mass…. and also my vision was to integrate that dashboard into sharepoint. From point of view the nes MS "strategy" works fine for me, my company and at least for our project.