Late yesterday Microsoft announced their new BI roadmap. The big change is that PerformancePoint Server will no longer be sold/developed as a separate product. All of the dashboard, KPI and analytic functions of PerformancePoint Server will now be available in a SharePoint Server Enterprise license! There will still be a release later this year for PerformancePoint Server SP3, but that will be the last separate release for that product. It is unclear what will happen to the Planning fuctions that were previously part of the ProClarity tools and will be enhanced in the SP3 release. For more info, click on the link above, which has a link to a video from Microsoft's Director of BI, Guy Weismantel.
For those that have used PerformancePoint Server this is not a big surprise, since SharePoint Server was always a requirement to even install PPS. In the end this will make the product line easier to understand and explain, plus for most users it won't cost any extra to take advantage of these great tools. With this change and the further integration with Excel in the Gemini release, this will make Microsoft BI available to anyone that wants to use it.
