Microsoft has just acquired ProClarity, a company that develops a very popular BI visualization tool. This is going to prove to be a very good move on their part because currently Microsoft’s BI initiative is really weak on the client-side. Right now the only BI tool they have is Excel, and while it’s excellent for advanced charting and other business functions, it has failed to gain any real respect in the growing BI market as a serious analytical tool.
ProClarity already works very well with Microsoft’s tools with their tool Analytics Server, and other technologies, so this is a natural pairing.
I’m personally hoping to see Microsoft merge the two technologies in the future and really give BI users a complete toolset for working with the advanced information being thrown at them. I like to think that we can look forward to further integration into the Microsoft toolset by extending the functionality of ProClarity directly into Reporting Services, Office, Integration Services, and many more. With information coming at us faster than ever before, and from every direction, BI needs are becoming more unpredictable. Microsoft can even leverage this acquisition to further its objective of bringing data mining to the common man. Data mining has yet to make a strong presence in even the most serious BI shops because it’s still mostly too new and too complicated for end users and even DBAs to understand.

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Posted by Sean McCown on April 10, 2006 07:45 PM