Microsoft Launches Key 2008 Products in Los Angeles

Redmond literally rolled out the blue carpet for the 4,000 IT professionals, developers, staff and partners who attended its official launch event for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles. The new SQL Server 2008 will be very interesting from a business intelligence/data warehousing initiatives.

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Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007: BI Worth the Price?

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a strong contender in the overall BI market and what makes Microsoft especially strong is that they include all three major pieces of analytics in one architecture: reporting, analytics and planning. I have had the chance to get exposed to this for a while now and with my almost 20 years of BI, I am impressed. With the consolidation wave in BI/data warehousing, I think Microsoft is a solution end user organizations should check out.

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Lucky 14 Executives Win Promotions in Microsoft Shuffle

Microsoft promotes 14 executives in a broad reorganization that affects many of the software giant's corporate divisions. Feb. 14 proved to be a lucky number for 14 Microsoft executives promoted to new positions in a company reorganization aiming to focus the company's leadership around its expanding portfolio of products and technologies. Every company has its own lifecycle, and Microsoft is identifying its own upcoming business models that will enable them to compete effectively in this marketplace. Business models around SaaS (Software as a service, or Software + Service as Microsoft calls it) will become a deciding factor of loosers and winners going forward.

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Lenovo ThinkPad X300: A new perfect laptop in the horizon?

I subscribe to BusinessWeek and the latest BusinessWeek had a new interesting story relating to a new laptop that Lenovo is releasing 26th of February according to the rumours. I have a pretty new Dell XPS 1330 laptop (ranked very high in different magazines), but I have to admit that the new one is of interest to me. This new laptop, Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is less than 3 pounds and has all of the goodies that one can expect. When it comes out, I hope to be able to check one out whether that is going to be my next one. I have owned multiple ThinkPads in my past and they have all been very good. They still seem to keep the traditional black color... to be very businesslike.

Gartner Group releases its new Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant

The consolidation wave within the BI and data warehousing domain is also showing its own impact on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The latest report demonstrate that vendors such as Microsoft has moved to leader position in execution and is well positioned to move itself on the visionary quadrant as well. It is obvious that the players in the niche players quadrant will have a challenge to compete and some older players such as SAS, MicroStrategy, Information Builders, SAP and many others have to re-evaluate their positioning and future strategy. Some of these players such as Microsoft has money to put in development and recent acquistion of Cognos by IBM and Business Objects by Oracle will only make the plays for niche players even harder. Time will tell who survives and consultants have to pick the ones that they think will be there for the long run.

Gates Talks Up Declarative Modeling Language Effort

The main goal of the plan is to make customizing applications much easier by reducing the need to code.Bill Gates from Microsoft Speaking at Microsoft's 2008 Office System Developers Conference in San Jose, California talked about declarative language project that would take programming to the next level and not having to deal with procedural languages. Gates acknowledged work was afoot on such an endeavor, although he described the effort as a five- to eight-year project. With the declarative language project, the goal is to make programming declarative rather than procedural. "Most code that's written today is procedural code. And there's been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn't have to write so much [procedural] code," Gates said. "We're investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today." Domain-specific modeling (DSM) has already been proved in the industry to attack specific domain-specific issues and it would be nice to see how DSM and this declarative modeling language effort compares.

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