SQL Server 2012 delivers the platform and familiar tools to manage data, generate actionable insights and help drive business impact.
SQL Server 2012: Proven Capability
SQL Server 2012 has already been deployed for production use by hundreds of global, industry-leading customers, such as Volvo Car Corp., Revlon, the HSN, Sanofi Pasteur, Klout and LG Chemical. Customers choosing SQL Server 2012 enjoy the benefit of a rich hardware and software partner ecosystem that can create solutions for the most unique and demanding data management needs.
With SQL Server 2012 and integrated business intelligence tools, you can process massive volumes of data queries in near-real time. Microsoft’s data platform has continued to advance and help users to keep up with the evolving world of data.
Tackling Big Data
IT research firm Gartner estimates that the volume of global data is growing at a rate of 59 percent per year, with 70 to 85 percent in unstructured form.* Furthering its commitment to connect SQL Server and rich business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and Power View, with unstructured data, Microsoft announced plans to release an additional limited preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure in the first half of 2012.
Continued Improvements, New Levels of Return on Investment
To help customers more cost-effectively manage their enterprise-scale workloads, Microsoft will release several new data warehousing solutions in conjunction with the general availability of SQL Server 2012, slated to begin April 1. This includes a major software update and new half-rack form factors for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse appliances, as well as availability of SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architectures for SQL Server 2012.
In addition, Microsoft is releasing results from a new Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact study on the potential benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2012. The study reports a potential return on investment of up to 189 percent with a 12-month payback period.
Microsoft and partners also announced today that SQL Server 2012 has demonstrated new record-breaking performance benchmarks through partner- and Microsoft-led testing that underscores SQL Server’s ability to scale across the enterprise.
Showing posts with label BI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BI. Show all posts
Friday, March 23, 2012
Thursday, October 7, 2010
BI Development promoted by Microsoft
Microsoft significantly updated its business intelligence (BI) stack with the releases of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Combined with Microsoft's PowerPivot application for general business users, Microsoft has managed to improve both the depth and breadth of its BI offerings.
Microsoft's BI message was on display at the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2010 and BI Conference 2010 events this week in New Orleans. Ted Kummert, senior vice president of the Business Platform Division at Microsoft keynoted the second day of the event and showed how Microsoft has exposed rich, self-service BI capabilities to line of business workers.
There is one audience that hasn't been getting a lot of attention in Microsoft's BI conversation, and that is developers. Until now.
Donald Farmer is principal program manager for SQL Server at Microsoft. He says Microsoft has worked to align its BI stack with Visual Studio, turning the IDE into, he said, "the development environment for BI."
"Our BI environment is our developer environment. What that means is there is a consistent set of tools across all the pieces," Farmer said. "You get versioning. You get a true build environment, which is very unusual for a BI environment."
If the strategy sounds familiar, it's because it is. Microsoft's efforts to up-level BI into an extensible platform for development mirrors similar efforts with other application stacks-turned-platforms, including Office and SharePoint.
The use of common tooling opens a lot of possibilities for robust, purpose-built application development. Farmer described a decision support scenario, where Visual Studio is used to embed predictive analytics into an Outlook-based CRM customer data entry application. Developers, he said, are able to use familiar SQL Server-like commands and well-known data structures.
Benefits of Embeddability
A major driver of effective BI, said Farmer, is the ability to embed functionality into applications. BI processes that require workers to jump to another interface are disruptive to users, and can pose issues for developers and BI designers forced to work with distinct environments.
"At the operational end, this has to be embedded in the applications they are already using. It has to be embedded in the call center application," he said. "That's one of the reasons embeddability is so important. It's one of the reasons having a developer story is so important."
That developer story may emerge as a significant competitive advantage for Redmond. Andrew Brust, Chief, New Technology for consultancy twentysix New York, a Microsoft Regional Director, and a member of Microsoft's BI Partner Advisory Council, gave a talk Tuesday afternoon at Tech Ed. He noted that the large ecosystem of partners and solution providers give the Microsoft BI stack an important competitive advantage over competitors.
Activity at the Tech Ed Conference underscored Brust's point. Attunity at the show introduced PowerPivot Connector for Oracle, a high performance link that enables PowerPivot to work with information stored in Oracle databases. Attunity also showed off its Stream CDC (Change Data Capture) product, a replication engine that offloads growing BI-related database workloads to a dedicated copy of the production database.
Itamar Ankorion, director of marketing and business development at Attunity, said organizations have grown increasingly concerned about the impact of intense BI activity on production data stores, particularly as user-friendly tools like PowerPivot expand the scope of BI usage. Ankorion expects that trend to grow.
"For developers in general, what we are going to see is developers building applications in PowerPivot," he said. "Just as you have people developing Excel applications, you will see this with PowerPivot."
Microsoft is working to make sure that is exactly what happens, by putting Visual Studio at the center of the BI universe. Said Farmer: "It was actually a revelation to us how much the BI community really wanted the Visual Studio environment."
Microsoft's BI message was on display at the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2010 and BI Conference 2010 events this week in New Orleans. Ted Kummert, senior vice president of the Business Platform Division at Microsoft keynoted the second day of the event and showed how Microsoft has exposed rich, self-service BI capabilities to line of business workers.
There is one audience that hasn't been getting a lot of attention in Microsoft's BI conversation, and that is developers. Until now.
Donald Farmer is principal program manager for SQL Server at Microsoft. He says Microsoft has worked to align its BI stack with Visual Studio, turning the IDE into, he said, "the development environment for BI."
"Our BI environment is our developer environment. What that means is there is a consistent set of tools across all the pieces," Farmer said. "You get versioning. You get a true build environment, which is very unusual for a BI environment."
If the strategy sounds familiar, it's because it is. Microsoft's efforts to up-level BI into an extensible platform for development mirrors similar efforts with other application stacks-turned-platforms, including Office and SharePoint.
The use of common tooling opens a lot of possibilities for robust, purpose-built application development. Farmer described a decision support scenario, where Visual Studio is used to embed predictive analytics into an Outlook-based CRM customer data entry application. Developers, he said, are able to use familiar SQL Server-like commands and well-known data structures.
Benefits of Embeddability
A major driver of effective BI, said Farmer, is the ability to embed functionality into applications. BI processes that require workers to jump to another interface are disruptive to users, and can pose issues for developers and BI designers forced to work with distinct environments.
"At the operational end, this has to be embedded in the applications they are already using. It has to be embedded in the call center application," he said. "That's one of the reasons embeddability is so important. It's one of the reasons having a developer story is so important."
That developer story may emerge as a significant competitive advantage for Redmond. Andrew Brust, Chief, New Technology for consultancy twentysix New York, a Microsoft Regional Director, and a member of Microsoft's BI Partner Advisory Council, gave a talk Tuesday afternoon at Tech Ed. He noted that the large ecosystem of partners and solution providers give the Microsoft BI stack an important competitive advantage over competitors.
Activity at the Tech Ed Conference underscored Brust's point. Attunity at the show introduced PowerPivot Connector for Oracle, a high performance link that enables PowerPivot to work with information stored in Oracle databases. Attunity also showed off its Stream CDC (Change Data Capture) product, a replication engine that offloads growing BI-related database workloads to a dedicated copy of the production database.
Itamar Ankorion, director of marketing and business development at Attunity, said organizations have grown increasingly concerned about the impact of intense BI activity on production data stores, particularly as user-friendly tools like PowerPivot expand the scope of BI usage. Ankorion expects that trend to grow.
"For developers in general, what we are going to see is developers building applications in PowerPivot," he said. "Just as you have people developing Excel applications, you will see this with PowerPivot."
Microsoft is working to make sure that is exactly what happens, by putting Visual Studio at the center of the BI universe. Said Farmer: "It was actually a revelation to us how much the BI community really wanted the Visual Studio environment."
Sunday, October 3, 2010
BI - Customer Data Integration (CPI)
Today, the CDI market has attracted several technology vendors from areas like ERP, CRM, data quality, and master data management. Unfortunately, while there is consensus that a CDI hub is critical for tying distributed customer data into unified views, there is rampant confusion on how best to implement such a hub. Currently, there are four “styles” of CDI implementations and before committing to a specific CDI style, organizations need to consider the fundamental business purpose of their current/future CDI hub.
Before committing to a specific CDI style, organizations need to consider the fundamental business purpose of their current/future CDI hub, including: frequency of business change, scope/latency of unified views, legacy IT environment, operational versus analytical applications need, types of data sources and data governance policies. Beyond these characteristics, an organization should choose a CDI style that is future-proof, i.e., it can adapt to merger & acquisitions, re-organizations and other systemic organizational changes. This involves four critical factors. First, the CDI hub architecture must adapt easily to changes over time, such as adding new business processes, data sources and applications. Second, it must allow for ongoing data stewardship/governance by both business and IT teams. Third, it must be an extensible IT platform in order to build new data views and services. Finally, it should be able to deliver these views in multiple modes – real-time and batch – to other systems at the performance and scaling requirements of the business.
Before committing to a specific CDI style, organizations need to consider the fundamental business purpose of their current/future CDI hub, including: frequency of business change, scope/latency of unified views, legacy IT environment, operational versus analytical applications need, types of data sources and data governance policies. Beyond these characteristics, an organization should choose a CDI style that is future-proof, i.e., it can adapt to merger & acquisitions, re-organizations and other systemic organizational changes. This involves four critical factors. First, the CDI hub architecture must adapt easily to changes over time, such as adding new business processes, data sources and applications. Second, it must allow for ongoing data stewardship/governance by both business and IT teams. Third, it must be an extensible IT platform in order to build new data views and services. Finally, it should be able to deliver these views in multiple modes – real-time and batch – to other systems at the performance and scaling requirements of the business.
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