Mobile Business Intelligence using SSRS in MS BI and impact on BISM

Mobile business intelligence is a growing need day by day, and with the advent of devices like Apple IPads and Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the requirement would continue to grow more and more. Long back when I was in my academics, we used to develop websites that would emit WML (Wireless Markup Language) over WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), which would be viewed on smart devices. We used to test these sites using Nokia mobile toolkit SDK. Time has changed drastically since then, and more android and symbian based thick clients as well as web based accelerator tools have emerged to cater mobile reporting needs. Mobile BI reporting is even more challenging, as this nature of reporting needs to be rich in visualizations as well as facilitate user interaction.

Blogosphere is celebrating the announcements made regarding SSAS and BISM, as the news are very positive and bright for SSAS and Vertipaq powered Powerpivot, but the set of reporting applications available as of now or on the horizon are still not that powerful. Crescent may be rich in visualizations (compared to SSRS), but not Mobile enabled to the best of my knowledge. SSRS, Powerpivot, Excel and Sharepoint Insights ( Excel Services, Visio Services, BCS, Performancepoint Services) - none of these can be made available for smart devices using any out-of-box features or technologies. The impact is that your BI solution is not mobile, and this can change the entire equation of technology selection. Just consider an example, that enterprises have online libraries for employees like Books24x7, and available over internet and even that is supported on smart devices. So if you plan to build a powerful BI and analytics application for an enterprise with maximum adoption and usability in view, with the tag of "NOT Mobile", how far one can expect the adoption and usability ?

Below is a list of a few prominent Mobile BI Vendors, but unfortunately SSRS / Microsoft is not on the list.

1) BIRT Mobile by Actuate

2) Roambi Enterprise Server (ES3) by MeLLmo

3) Microstrategy Mobile

4) PushBI by Extended Results

5) SAP BusinessObjects

6) QlikView for Mobile by QlikTech

7) SAS Mobile

8) SoftMaster Mobile Business Intelligence for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)

9) IBM Cognos 8 Go! Mobile for Cognos Business Intelligence

10) Other players such as LogiXML and Analyzer from Strategy Companion are emerging players.

Even I am happy with the announcements made by BISM, but still the weakness in reporting stack adds a concern, for which I do not see an out-of-box solution from MS BI Stack. The later Microsoft makes an entry into this area, the harder it would be to promote its adoption as clients would already had invested into other accelerators which are not Microsoft partners in this space. It's not a show stopper, but the results are obvious !! I am sure Microsoft must be having this in their vision, and if someone is reading this post from Microsoft, I would be glad to hear back their comments on this viewpoint of mine. Also please someone correct me if I am not updated in my knowhow on support for smart devices by reporting applications in Microsoft BI ecosystem.