Getting timely access to enterprise-wide data and moving beyond a solution based on Microsoft® Office Access to consolidate this data for up-to-date reporting
Point of slide: To In your organization there are challenges when it comes to implementing Business Intelligence solutions. The first is cost:How can I reduce the time to implement the solution?How can I make sure the solution I choose best utilizes the skill set of my organization and the infrastructure I have in place?How can I consolidate the number of vendor solutions that I have to maintain?The second challenge revolves around meeting the needs of my end users. How can I best deliver information to them that’s relevant to their needs, that’s widely accessible and adopted, and that reduces training time. The third set of challenges is really around maintaining the solution moving forward:How can I consolidate my disperse data sources and ensure the data is sound and trusted?How do I keep up with the performance and scale needs of my organization?How easy is the system going to be to manage?
Point of slide:See http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/partnersolutionmarketplace/CaseStudyDetail.aspx?casestudyid=4000004005.Every day, the 15,000 information workers at Tyson Foods share information with one another to develop and market hundreds of products. To speed employee connections, strengthen business insight, and improve efficiency, Tyson deployed SharePoint Server 2007 as its companywide collaboration platform. Using the software’s Enterprise Search capability, employees can find the people and data they need quickly, and employees have created more than 700 personal sites to share skills and experience. Users can access dashboards that expose SAP data through SharePoint sites to aid decision making, as well as BI tools that integrate with Microsoft Office desktop programs for improved insights. In addition, the IT staff has been able to quickly create powerful new Office Business Applications that are boosting productivity and savings across the company.Tyson employees are discovering the powerful BI capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007: dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), business connectivity technologies, and reporting tools. The employees use these capabilities to self-service their information needs and to create, publish, and distribute information more securely, with little training. For example, prior to using SharePoint Server 2007 to publish sales force scorecards, salespeople would spend two weeks every quarter completing complex forms that requested performance metrics in a number of areas. The accounting staff would pull data from Cognos into spreadsheets and combine it with data that they manually extracted from other systems such as SAP. Now, the Tyson IT staff uses Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007 to combine the sales and SAP data into an Excel 2007 spreadsheet that is accessible through a single dashboard. This tremendously reduces preparation time and makes business users happier. Because Excel Services dynamically renders the spreadsheet as an interactive HTML Web Part, users can access the spreadsheet from the SharePoint site with any Web browser. In one dashboard screen, Tyson sales managers and salespeople can view individual performance, or the performance of a team, in a way that makes sense to them. “Salespeople can see what they’re being measured against and view their own performance in the context of their peers across the company,” Wilson says. “Managers can see their entire team’s performance and drill down for more detail.”Similarly, in the finance department, the IT staff uses SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to create analysis cubes—data structures that enable fast analysis of data—and uses Excel Services to publish those cubes to a SharePoint site, where financial analysts can easily view them. SQL Server Analysis Services is a suite of data mining services included in SQL Server 2008 data management software. Tyson uses SQL Server Reporting Services to create financial reports that are posted on SharePoint sites for easy report distribution and management.
Point of slide: To See http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000004514.Talking Points: G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers (G&J Pepsi) has been a leading bottler and distributor of Pepsi and other beverages throughout Kentucky and Ohio. Operating four manufacturing and 13 distribution facilities, the company is one of the largest Pepsi bottlers in the U.S. To run its complex operations, G&J Pepsi needs timely access to enterprise-wide data.The solution they were using was not providing them with the timely information they needed nor did it give them insight from across the organization. Becausethe company had previously standardized on Microsoft for its back-office applications and already used SharePoint to enable collaboration, they wanted to leverage their existing IT investments. The Microsoft BI solution allowed them to:Consolidate data from across the organization:Theycan now access data from nearly 50 fields from theircustomer data. Their old reporting system took so long and was so cumbersometo manipulate that they’d pick and choose what information they wanted, usually limiting ourselves to only 15 fields.”They’ve also created role based dashboards for each team, giving them insight into the relevant information then need. Improve Business Agility:With a richer pool of data, employees have more flexibility in how they analyze the business. One example is bringing multiple types of data on one report, which you could never do in our old system. With month-to-date data and fiscal-year data on the same report, we can really tell how one month’s performance will impact the entire year.”Monitor performance and quickly respond to changing business conditions:Their sales team can track month-to-date trends and opportunities. Vending looks at machine throughput, while operational teams view performance to forecast for manufacturing. We’re taking advantage of our Microsoft solution to make better decisions in nearly every part of the business.” Benefits:Recently, G&J Pepsi ran a marketing promotion. Reviewing daily reports, the team realized quickly sales failed to spike, immediately ceased the program, and diverted funds to a more profitable initiative.The company is also closing out month-end data within 24 hours, rather than two to three days. But most importantly, G&J Pepsi is now reviewing data frequently, constantly assessing the impact of volume and pricing on profitability. --------------Background:Business NeedsFor more than 40 years, G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers (G&J Pepsi) has been a leading bottler and distributor of Pepsi and other beverages throughout Kentucky and Ohio. Operating four manufacturing and 13 distribution facilities, the company is one of the largest Pepsi bottlers in the U.S. To run its complex operations, G&J Pepsi needs timely access to enterprise-wide data. For years, the company has used a solution based on Microsoft® Access®.“Consolidating data was a problem – we were always two days behind,” says Chris Witzgall, vice president of IT at G&J Pepsi. “Anytime we drilled into detailed information on products, customers, or vending locations, we had data performance issues.”Compounding matters, G&J Pepsi housed its data on five disparate servers. “We needed to bring our data into a single warehouse,” continues Witzgall. “We wanted a solution that would not only consolidate our data, but allow us to dig into it for more than just sales reporting.” SolutionG&J Pepsi adopted a Microsoft® Business Intelligence (BI) solution based on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, and Microsoft PerformancePoint® Server 2007 (now part of Office SharePoint Server 2007). Because the company had previously standardized on Microsoft for its back-office applications and already used SharePoint to enable collaboration, choosing Microsoft was a natural decision.“We wanted to utilize our existing Microsoft infrastructure,” says Witzgall. “But even more importantly, the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution had all the flexibility we needed. Microsoft gave us open access to our data – at a price we could afford.”More, Richer DataCincinnati-based PCMS IT Advisor Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that specializes in Information Worker Solutions based on Microsoft technology, helped G&J Pepsi craft and implement its solution. With PCMS providing valuable data warehouse knowledge and training, G&J Pepsi had all of its rich data in one place within months. “Microsoft Business Intelligence is so powerful that we were able to bring in all of our data, even if we didn’t think we’d ever use it,” says Daniel Foster, corporate IT project manager at G&J Pepsi. “For example, we can now access data from nearly 50 fields from our master customer data file. Our old reporting system took so long and was so cumbersome to manipulate that we’d pick and choose what information we wanted, usually limiting ourselves to only 15 fields.”With a richer pool of data, employees have more flexibility in how they analyze the business. “We can slice and dice information from different directions,” says Witzgall. “And we can get multiple types of data on one report, which you could never do in our old system. For example, with month-to-date data and fiscal-year data on the same report, we can really tell how one month’s performance will impact the entire year.”Role-Based SharePoint SitesAbout 300 of G&J Pepsi’s employees regularly use the company’s business intelligence solution, accessing SharePoint sites designed to give them information relevant to their job role. Now every functional group within the company – including finance, sales, operations, and vending – can easily view and analyze data.“We created customized SharePoint sites with reports and dashboards targeted at each user group,” explains Witzgall. “And if they want to conduct more detailed analysis, they can easily pull data into Excel and use powerful tools, such as Pivot Tables.”By monitoring performance more closely than ever, G&J Pepsi is able to respond quickly to changing business and market conditions. Witzgall explains: “We can evaluate product mixes for our most important customers and know immediately whether a marketing campaign is successful. Our sales team tracks month-to-date trends and opportunities. Vending looks at machine throughput, while operational teams view performance to forecast for manufacturing. We’re taking advantage of our Microsoft solution to make better decisions in nearly every part of the business.” BenefitsRecently, G&J Pepsi ran a marketing promotion. Reviewing daily reports, the team realized quickly sales failed to spike, immediately ceased the program, and diverted funds to a more profitable initiative.The company is also closing out month-end data within 24 hours, rather than two to three days. “Our VP of sales couldn’t believe it,” remarks Witzgall. “He’s thrilled to get final month-end numbers the next day.”But most importantly, G&J Pepsi is now reviewing data frequently, constantly assessing the impact of volume and pricing on profitability. “We’re asking questions every day about performance,” says Witzgall. “Microsoft Business Intelligence helps us monitor the business so we can improve performance. It’s a critical contributor to our goal of growing profits.”
Script:Data volumes are exploding with event data streaming from sources such as RFID, sensors and web logs across industries including manufacturing, financial services and utilities. The size and frequency of the data make it challenging to store for data mining and analysis. The ability to monitor, analyze and act on the data in motion provides significant opportunity to make more informed business decisions in near real-time.<click>StreamInsight, Microsoft’s Complex Event Processing platform allows you to process events with low latency so that action can be taken immediately based on the insights derived. Companies can process high volumes of data and scale up as required. Scale up and define as many queries as is required to process these streams. and Derive insights by correlating multiple event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency for improved business decisions.StreamInsight is all about Enabling organizations to derive insights from streaming information in near real-time
Point of slide: Review Microsoft’s BI visionScript:Microsoft’s Business Intelligence vision is to “Improve organizations by providing business insights to all employees leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions.”We do this by providing: Comprehensive,integrated BI and performance management offerings Agile products that adapt to how you use information And a solution that is built upon a trusted IT backboneIn the end, we get the right information, in the right format, at the right time to the right people to better inform the decisions they make throughout the day. These decisions range from the strategic to tactical to operational, and all lead to a better performing company.
Point of the Slide: To show more detail on how we think of the BI architecture in three main layers.Flow of the Slide: A trusted BI platform is critical for a BI solution to work today. If we’re going to achieve the promise of BI, we need to have the confidence and trust in the data. And we need to know where it came from, and that it is both timely and reliable for us to use to make a decision. That’s where the power of an integrated BI platform like SQL Server comes into play.Once you have the data ready to use, the middle tier comes into play, where business users actually interact with the data and turn it into something that is useful to them to make the right decision. The numbers that we pull from other systems are just that—we need applications and content to turn them into actionable items. And that’s where the middle tier comes into play. Finally, we need the right tools and applications to ensure that we can use that data in the way we want to in order to make our decisions. Applications and tools that range from personal, to team, to organizational and corporate tools, all with a familiar look and feel, all integrated and working with my operating system, e-mail, and Internet search function. And this is what the power of integration through Microsoft Office brings you. From the Microsoft Office productivity tools like Excel to the team and collaboration tools of SharePoint. By integrating BI seamlessly into a broader business productivity suite that includes search, collaboration, unified communications, and content management, we offer the end user a much richer experience. Soundbite: With other BI solutions, you need 3 to 4 to 6 to 10 different products, footprints, and integration points. In our BI solution, we look at three main layers of data and information that you need—all within the Microsoft Office and SQL Server families: The data infrastructure and BI platform; the middle tier, where the business user comes into play, and the individual layer, where you and I use the data to make decisions.
Point of slide: To outline the key benefits of the Microsoft BI product offering and set up the following nine slides. Empower Your People: Empower all users to collaborate, discover, and manage their aspect of the business with the right information to make better, more agile decisions. By using familiar tools to create and share the right information, users are able to drive the business forward by responding in a timely fashion, and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise. Powerful self-service capabilities integrated into familiar tools enable users to create and share the right information quickly.Improve Organizational Effectiveness: Manage, drive, and define organizational success by aligning to key metrics and strategy, creating context driven dashboards that present the necessary information quickly and seamlessly. Measure the critical success factors and enable everyone to create and analyze the information they need to stay informed, and move the business forward. Enable accountability and transparency across the company, and remove barriers to productivity.Enable IT Efficiency: Provide a complete, integrated business collaboration platform that empowers users to discover, analyze, and share the right information across unstructured assets such as blogs, wikis, documents; and structured assets such as reports, line of business, and analytical systems. Built on standards, IT can address business requirements by putting information in the hands of users, focusing on developing, maintaining and securing the systems that drive the business forward and centrally manage the system.
Point of slide: To introduce PowerPivot for Excel.Flow of slide:Business value: Connect with the previous Microsoft BI Vision slide. PowerPivot works within Excel, the world’s most popular analysis tool, and enables more people in the organization to perform self-service analysis. It’s familiar to your users and can help lower training costs. Microsoft BI gets the right information to the right people faster. Providing self-service access to BI capabilities allows users to access, analyze, and collaborate on critical business information to make the best possible decisions. Technical features: The revolutionary PowerPivot for Excel allows you to quickly manipulate very large data sets and share analysis with co-workers—with little or no IT assistance. PowerPivot supports the unmatched analytical power and ease-of-use of Excel while allowing users to connect to any data source—databases, reports, data feeds, Web pages, Excel files, and more. After performing analysis, you can publish it to SharePoint 2010, further enabling collaboration with others. Benefit to IT: IT benefits from the managed self-service capabilities within PowerPivot, creating reports using SQL Server Reporting Services R2 and SharePoint 2010—thus providing a single version of truth—while you work directly with current and relevant data from those reports via Data Feeds. In addition, IT can track the usage of PowerPivot applications and discover mission-critical Excel applications.
Point of slide: To introduce other new features within Excel 2010.Use the powerful self-service analysis capabilities in Microsoft Excel to slice through massive amounts of data, uncover patterns, and find answers. Analysis tools include:Advanced Visualizations like new chart types to discover patterns, highlight trends, and spot exceptionsSlicers to slice and dice through large amounts of data and identify trendsPivotTables to interactively explore your data and summarize it in useful reportsNamed Sets to quickly identify and work with a relevant set of data every time
Point of slide: To introduce PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.Script:The revolutionary PowerPivot technology includes both an Excel add-in and server-based technology that integrates with SharePoint. This allows your users to quickly manipulate very large data sets and share analysis with co-workers—with little or no IT assistance. PowerPivot supports the unmatched analytical power and ease-of-use of Excel while allowing users to connect to any data source—databases, reports, data feeds, Web pages, Excel files, and more. After performing analysis, you can publish it to SharePoint 2010, further enabling collaboration with others. These capabilities provide a single version of truth for all users. IT also benefits from the managed self-service capabilities within PowerPivot. IT can now create reports using SQL Server Reporting Services R2 and SharePoint 2010 andtrack the usage of PowerPivot applications and discover mission-critical Excel applications. Conclusion: PowerPivot is the key to managed self-service BI and empowering end users. PowerPivotenables seamless and secure sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions, while helping IT organizations increase efficiency through the PowerPivot Management Dashboard.
Point of slide: Elaborate on the capabilities provided through Reporting Services and Report Builder 3.0. Script:Working through the familiar Microsoft Office interface, users can use Report Builder 3.0 to intuitively build the reports they need. Report wizards and reusable report components make report building fast and easy. Accelerate report creation by leveraging existing content, such as queries, tables, charts, maps, gauges, and logos.Powerful query designer and flexible layout options enable end users to produce reports with rich visualizations while supporting all data sources. And, it’s easy to share reports in a SharePoint-based environment. Conclusion:Report Builder 3.0 supports the publishing and reuse of subcomponents to accelerate development and lower costs. Report Builder 3.0 also helps keep reports up to date by automatically synchronizing updates with published content objects. This empowers your end users to deliver meaningful, up to date reports largely independent of IT.
Point of slide: ToMake the most of reusable components and rich visualization capabilities to deliver meaningful, effective reporting solutions. New visualizations allow users to graphically convey the right information easily.Enjoy rich visualization of geospatial data: “Mash up” business information with geographic representations for location-based data visualization, including mapping, routing, and custom shapes.Visualize data within a single cell: With Sparklines, a new feature in Excel 2010, you can create small charts in a single cell to quickly discover patterns in your data. It’s a quick and easy way to highlight important data trends such as seasonal increases or decreases, saving you time.Zero in on the right data points quickly: Excel 2010 delivers new and exciting slice-and-dice capabilities. The Slicer feature provides you with a rich visualization of your PivotTable view so you can dynamically segment and filter the data to display just what you need. With the search filter, you can spend less time sifting through large data sets in your tables and PivotTable views, and more time analyzing. Take advantage of a more interactive and dynamic PivotChart: Quickly gather more insights within your PivotChart. Display different data views directly in a PivotChart, independent of PivotTable views, to analyze and capture the most compelling view for your numbers.
Point of slide: To set up the outline of the main body of the presentation. The presentation will include demos and two slides for each section.Script:In order to improve organizational effectiveness, you need to support business collaboration across the enterprise. This means your business intelligence solution needs to help you:Find people, expertise, and informationCapture and use business informationCollaborate anywhere, anytimeEnable alignment, transparency, and accountability.Over the next several slides and through demos, we’ll show you how Microsoft BI supports these important collaboration capabilities.
Point of slide: Tointroduce BI features in Sharepoint.Flow of slide:Now that the end user has performed his or her analysis within Excel, it is time to share insights with the rest of the organization. Excel Services, part of SharePoint Server 2010, makes sharing business insights easier, so everyone throughout your organization can make better business decisions. Integration with Excel Services allows you to broadly and securely publish spreadsheets and other information with colleagues. Specifically, Excel Services allows you to dynamically render an Excel spreadsheet as HTML so others can access, navigate, filter, and interact with the information within a Web browser. Excel Services also improves spreadsheet management, security, and spreadsheet model reuse using a scalable server-based calculation service and interactive Web-based user interface. With Excel Services, you can:Broaden the access and availability of spreadsheets by incorporating interactive spreadsheets into BI portals, dashboards, and scorecardsSecure and protect confidential information and maintain one version of the truth by locking down access at the serverPowerPivot for Sharepoint allows you to easily publish your PowerPivot workbooks and analysis to SharePoint 2010, enabling further analysis and collaboration with others via a web-based interface. SQL Server 2008 R2 also enables support for ad hoc BI applications in SharePoint, including automatic data refreshes and data processing with the same performance as in Excel.
Point of slide: ToSee http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000000706.Energizer Holdings, based in St. Louis, Missouri, is a leading manufacturer of batteries, flashlights, and wet-shave products. The global company has made a significant investment in Microsoft Office software for its 6,800 knowledge workers, who also use dozens of specialized line-of-business (or LOB) applications to do their jobs. Energizer is installing Microsoft Office Professional 2007 on its desktop computers so that users can better access LOB data from within the familiar Microsoft Office system. Using 2007 Microsoft Office programs, Energizer employees will be better able to access the data they need with less application-switching, and to improve productivity by eliminating time-consuming process steps. The IT staff will be able to eliminate tedious data integration work and focus on creating new business capabilities. Supply chain managers at Energizer are able to use Office Excel 2007 to dynamically extract data from supply chain planning, statistical planning, sales history, and POS systems. “Previously, we could always import data into Excel, but it was clunky,” Benz says. “Now we can quickly link directly to data from multiple sources. Office Excel 2007 behaves like a real application environment.”
Point of slide: To introduce other features within SharePoint 2010Flow of slide: Now that you have shared your report, SharePoint 2010 enables the entire organization to discuss and engage with the data and with each other.Wikis and blogs: Wikis and blogging features with SharePoint 2010 make it easy for team members to comment and discuss insights.Tagging: Easily navigate through SharePoint with pervasive tagging.Content rating: Content rating enables users to give feedback on reports and to identify useful reports.
Point of slide: To highlight how search features help to find organizational data.Search for relevant BI content:Use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the Microsoft enterprise search solution, to increase productivity. Advanced search features help reduce BI information overload by enabling you to find relevant content quickly. With smarter, more visual, and more conversational intranet searches, SharePoint Server 2010 lets you go beyond documents to unlock BI information and effectively search for people, documents, and data—and deliver actionable search results. Build customized search scenarios and deliver results quickly for role-specific, context-driven needs, expanding your ability to apply BI insights across the organization.
Point of slide: To highlight dashboards.Publish rich Excel workbooks or objects to create insightful dashboards:SharePoint 2010 helps you collaborate on data, documents, and decision-making, so you can further improve organizational effectiveness. SharePoint provides collaborative features to ensure that content is created, accessed, and shared in a transparent and accountable environment. For example, you can tag a document with metadata to make the document more relevant and easier to find. SharePoint can help track documents and alert you to content updates relevant to your user group, meeting space, and team or project site. SharePoint Server 2010 also supports workflows that can streamline approval processes and built-in versioning to help you better manage content and data access.
Point of slide: Introduce “Administrative Consistency” and how it helps increase IT efficiency.Script:Underpinning all three pillars related to increasing IT efficiency is Microsoft’s unique approach to administrative consistency.
Point of the Slide: To show how the broad set of out-of-the-box capabilities provided with SharePoint and SQL allow you to consolidate your multiple investments to save on cost and complexity. Flow of the Slide: Out of the box SQL is a robust BI platform and provides a set of integrated capabilities that allow you to consolidate your investments:Analytics – SQL Server Analysis Services is the leading OLAP engine on the market today. Reporting – SQL Server Reporting Services provides robust reporting capabilities and authoring environment.Data Mining – SQL Server provides powerful data mining capabilities and innovative data mining add-ins for Excel.Data Quality – SQL Server provides data quality capabilities to ensure your data is correct. Master Data Management – SQL Server provides capabilities around Master Data Management, allowing you to continue managing the synchronization of data throughout your organization. ETL – SQL Server Integration services provides extract, transform, and load capabilities to help you consolidate your data from across your organization. Data Warehousing – SQL Server provides enterprise scale data warehousing capabilities. SharePoint is a broad collaborative environment that provides capabilities such as portal, collaboration, forms and workflow, search, scorecards and dashboards, and enterprise content management.
Point of the Slide:SQL Server has a strong lineup of Data Warehouse offerings based on scale-up architecture. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and the Fast Track Data Warehouse enables customers to scale their data warehouses on single servers through a scale up architecture. In addition, project Madison that will ship in H1 of CY2010 will enable customers to deploy very high scale data warehouses up to one petabyte through a scale out architecture. Based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) with shared nothing architecture, Madison will enable customers to implement extremely large data warehouses with high performance at low cost. Customers can scale their data warehouses affordably by adding more commodity hardware rather than buying large hardware servers. Thanks to the heavy investment, SQL Server 2008 offers the following new features that reduce the cost while improving scalability and performance of data warehouses: Query Optimizations:The new query enhancements in SQL Server 2008 will improve the performance of your BI and data warehouse queries out of the box. The star join query optimizations improve the performance of queries on data warehouses that use a star join schema. New enhancements in parallel query processing will also boost the performance of your BI and data warehouse queries with no additional effort. Resource Governor:Scale your data warehouse seamlessly using the new Resource Governor in SQL Server 2008. As more user groups with different requirements join your data warehouse, the new Resource Governor enables you to manage them easily on the same platform. Resource Governor enables you to allocate resources (for example, memory and CPU) to different user groups based on their needs. As a result, no single user group can use too many resources or freeze other users. Enhanced Partitioning:The new enhancements in parallel partitioning will boost the performance of queries that use partitioned tables. Database and Backup Compression:The new database compression feature in SQL Server 2008 helps customers reduce their storage cost while improving performance of data warehouses. Benchmarks have shown compression ratios of 2X to 12X, although a 2.5X ratio is more typical. Reduction of data leads directly to storage savings for our customers and partnersThe new backup compression also reduces the size of backup data for customers. Smaller back-up data also speed up backups and restore operations. As a result customers will reduce their backup cost through the new backup compression feature in SQL Server 2008.
Point of slide: To show how Microsoft BI enables IT to easily manage the BI environment.Easily manage the self-service environment:Self-service is great for end users, but IT still needs to control access, security, and quality. Enhanced administration capabilities are available within the new administration dashboard within SharePoint. The administration dashboard allows IT to monitor and govern the content that workers create using self-service tools. IT can track, review, and report on thousands of users, so they can determine the content being used, evaluate the reports being accessed, and identify other access and frequency trends, so that they can more quickly shift resources and support to the areas of greatest need.
Point of slide: To show how Microsoft helps you increase productivity in your IT department through the delivery of familiar and intuitive development and management tools.Flow of slide: Productivity Enhancing Designers – By delivering BI capabilities through the familiar design environments such as the BI Development Studio in Microsoft Visual Studio® and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, developers can get up speed quickly without having to learn new skills. Integrated Development Environment – Utilizing the same familiar development environment for multiple capabilities allows developers to integrate BI capabilities into their app design more easily, such as with the Reporting Services capability in Visual Studio. User Driven App Administration and Monitoring – Enhanced administration capabilities can be demonstrated through the new admin dashboard for Gemini, allowing you to monitor and govern the content that end users are creating through the self-service tools.
Point of slide: Describe master data services (data alignment across multiple systems)Script:The recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, SOA, and mergers and acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business imperative.IT is challenged with delivering high quality master data including: creating, maintaining and delivering trusted versions of master data and relationships. Delivers single, trusted versions of critical data assets and their relationships across heterogeneous platforms Delivers trusted master data to downstream data warehouse, analytics and BI systems in consumable formatsAnother important capability of Microsoft BI is the ability to align data across multiple heterogeneous systems with Master Data Services.
Point of slide: ToGartner Inc. recently positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms. Microsoft’s StrengthsMicrosoft joined the BI market relatively late with a broadly capable product set at a low price point. Since then it has consistently developed its offering, edging into the Leaders quadrant in last year’s BI Platform Magic Quadrant. Microsoft’s pricing and packaging of its BI platform make it an attractive proposition for organizations new to BI or firms that are looking to reduce their portfolio of BI tools and lower their annual software maintenance bills. Growing market penetration — almost a third of the reference customers Microsoft nominated to take part in the research for this report had bought its BI platform in the last year, corroborating earlier analysis finding a strong intent to purchase for Microsoft in this market. Strong leverage of installed base of products. By placing Excel, SQL Server, and the very rapidly spreading SharePoint Server at the center its BI strategy, Microsoft virtually guarantees its BI offering’s continued adoption. Microsoft’s BI plafform appeals to the large community of Microsoft application developers — its development tools were rated the best of any vendor in the market by the customers surveyed.
Point of the Slide: Reinforce the message that this is an area of importance for the companyFlow of the Slide:If you’d like to take some time on your own and learn more about our BI capabilities, customers who are utilizing them, and ways we can help users throughout your organization, we’d invite you to visit us at www.microsoft.com/bi to learn more about how our solutions can help your organizationSoundbite: If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you drive performance and intelligence to every employee in your organization, we’d invite you to visit us at www.microsoft.com/bi for more information.
Point of slide: Committed to your success:Microsoft Services: Microsoft Services can help you realize the full potential of our products. It offers proven methodologies during the entire application life cycle, from Architecture Planningto Solution Implementation to Solution Support. The use of best practices ensures reduced project risk, increased implementation velocity, and more predictable outcomes.Advisory Architecture and PlanningHighly skilled Application Platform consultingEnterprise support for high availability, critical applicationsProven adoption methodologies to reduce risk and increase velocityMicrosoft Partners and ISVs: The Microsoft Partner program and other certifications for partners and ISVs makes it easy for you to find a partner to help you—at either a global or a local level.LOB applications to fit your needsGlobal and local presenceTrained, certified, and assisted by MicrosoftMicrosoft Learning: Microsoft Learning, together with MSDN and TechNet provides a wealth of readiness training that you can use to quickly develop the skills you need to implement and manage Microsoft technologies.IT Pro communities to share latest trends and innovationOnline and classroom trainingCertification to ensure qualityApplication Platform: The Application Platform Optimization 2.0 tool provides the starting point for evaluating your existing applications and identifying how to optimize them with the Microsoft Application PlatformHelp you assess your business applicationsPropose technology solution plan to answer your business and IT requirementsIMPORTANT LINKS:If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you drive performance and intelligence to every employee in your organization, we’d invite you to visit us at www.microsoft.com/bi and www.microsoft.com/applicationplatform for more information.
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