Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference
I'm wrapping up my first full day here at the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle. It's the second annual conference and I attended the first one back in early 2007. So far Microsoft is delivering as promised with loads of case studies, best practice examples, and great information on the complete "BI stack". The sense is that Microsoft has arrived as one of the top four BI mega vendors with IBM, Oracle, and SAP - except that Microsoft has a major leg up in the "BI for Everyone" space.
The highlight of the day was the discussion around "Gemini", a new function of SQL Server 2008 to be released in 18 months or so. Gemini will allow non-developer business users and analysts to build ad hoc OLAP cube environments through Excel. The solution will really change the way we approach "starter BI" projects with specific departments or teams. Instead of building a data mart, OLAP cube, and the UI, we'll instead start with Excel to pull together existing and new data sources to build new BI solutions without a lot of IT overhead.
As a partner its exciting to see the progress that has been made since the last conference, and the number of customers who are solidly behind the Microsoft BI vision.
I'm looking forward to the keynote tomorrow by Ben Stein who will address the economy and how BI can help. http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/default.aspx
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