IS Partners has placed its full support behind Microsoft's earlier announcement to consolidate Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server's monitor and analytical capabilities into Office SharePoint Server Enterprise as PerformancePoint Services.
Caron Mooney, director at IS Partners, says Microsoft's decision reflects a need in the market for companies to rationalise their BI tools and, so, do more with less. “The monitoring and analysis capabilities of PerformancePoint will be bundled with SharePoint, giving organisations that have invested in SharePoint instant access to fully-fledged business intelligence on an optimised platform,” she says.
Mooney believes that that Microsoft SharePoint will become the standardised applications interface. Many other Microsoft products, such as FAST Search and Enterprise Dimension Manager, have already been aligned to SharePoint.
“We have invested in Knowledge Management, of which SharePoint is the main Microsoft toolset. Microsoft's recent decision to consolidate product sets will enhance our ability to drive new opportunities for our customers.”
While BI tool sets were historically more of an introduction to BI for rendering information, surveys show that large corporate can own up to 14 of these tool-sets. “Consolidating BI tools into the BI platform of choice will circumvent the cost and development issues that arise as a result of over-investment in tools, and the complexities commonly perceived in implementing the technology,” Mooney says.
“IS Partners is also well positioned to assist companies leverage their current technology investment. Organisations need to consider the 'free' tools they have available; existing SQL Server and SharePoint tools would mean that a company will have no need to invest more in the BI platform.”
According to Microsoft, PerformancePoint Planning will remain available and be supported for the next eight-and-a-half years. “We do not believe that Microsoft's announcement will lead to a product gap as support for PerformancePoint Planning will be ongoing, while monitoring and analytics will form an integral part of Sharepoint Server's functionality,” she adds.
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Established in 2001, IS Partners addresses the need for quality implementations of Microsoft solutions. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for business intelligence, IS Partners specialises in empowering sales, marketing, financial and management in its customer base. This includes various industries such as retail, distribution, finance and IT.
IS Partners uses its own proven, streamlined methodology for all implementations. It also specialises in bringing bottom line value to CRM systems, providing business analysis, technical design, application architecture, implementation, training and performance tuning of CRM implementations on the Microsoft platform and Microsoft's own CRM solution. For more information, go to: http://www.ispartners.co.za.
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