Excel 2013 BI versus SSRS 2012

1) Excel 2013 has PowerPivot 2012 integrated / inbuilt into it. This means access to vertipaq engine, data processing, and dashboard related benefits. Powerpivot 2012 is able to harness the power of Windows Azure Data Market too. More on the same can be read from here.

2) Excel 2013 had PowerView integrated / inbuilt into it. This means all the reporting related benefits, visualizations like charts - graphs - bing maps, KPIs and dashboarding and other dashboard related components like hierarchies etc. PowerView is designed to interpret DAX queries on BISM model, and integration with Excel means that now Excel is even more capable of reporting BISM data models than PowerView itself. More on the same can be read from here.

3) Excel 2013 can connect to Hadoop on Azure using Hive ODBC Driver. This means excel can exploit data from cloud from related data stored in Azure databases as well as big data stores like Hadoop. More on the same can be read from here.

4) Excel 2013 facilitates sourcing media and other rich content from the web using it's newly introduced Content app and Task pane app. This means very rich integration using a relatively least complex tool compared to other self service tools available in the industry. More on this can be read from here.

5) Excel 2013 ships with some great advancements in visualizations. Users are not expected to be very deeply insighted into reports development, and components that can even make suggestions on the kind of reports suited for the kind of data they are available. More on this can be read from here.

6) Most of the applications provide features to export data into excel, which means any kind of data can be easily imported into excel. Also most of the applications provide plug-in for Excel to provide deeper integration with excel to make the data exchange process easier.

7) Excel 2013 now supports decoupled PivotTable and PivotCharts, that means better representation of trend analysis. And even Excel Services supports this feature. More on this can be read from here.

This list is not an exhaustive list of features, and I am sure there are many more features worth listing. Above listed are just those that I could remember quickly. I am not saying SSRS is a weak tool by any means and on top of that its a server line of technology and integrated with SQL Server. It has great visualizations and available in the form of service which is suitable from a scalability and architecture standpoint.

But clients with

• lots of data stored in variety of data stores
• limited funds and even limited time and patience to wait for IT to facilitate their analytical needs
• totally resistant to learn another tool claiming to be their analytics angel
• and seeking to retain the power of determining the landscape of analytics in their own hands

would definitely find Excel 2013 as their BI magnet.

If you have more Excel 2013 BI features worth listing, feel free to comment the same on this post.

Windows Azure Market Place ( Data Market and App Market ) - Potential jobs for BI Tools

Windows Azure Market Place is a cloud based service offering on the Azure platform from Microsoft . For those who are completely unaware of Azure, I can say that I find it synonymous to Amazon Web Services in the making. Services available or to-be available on this platform can be divided in two parts: Data Market and App Market.

Data Market which was formerly know as Microsoft Codename "Dallas" is now commercially available, and this announcement was made very recently. Also many other significant announcements for the Windows Azure Market Place, which can be read from here. App Market which is another section of services related to application development and hosting would be commercially released, probably early next year.

My area of interest revolves around data market. Data Market being a platform of data / content providers is a potential future candidate to be considered as a vital data source on the cloud. Traditionally we were used to see data sources as only in-premise databases like SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, DB2 and others. But with the advent of cloud, we also see SQL Azure as a data source today. In my views if this platform evolves considerably, there is a bright scope that this is the probable new data source on the cloud.

Also this opens up jobs for MS BI Tools, especially SSIS and SSRS. I definitely see a requirement to merge data from different data providers that one might have subscribed, and create reports which is facilitated by Excel / Excel Add-In presently, can be replaced by SSRS. Data access from this platform is facilitated through REST APIs or OData, and MS BI Tools lack this support. But by the time DataMarket gains adoption as well as maturity from partners and consumers, we can expect MS BI tools to provide support for the same. Powerpivot is already aligned by Microsoft to serve the data analysis needs. Interestingly Tableau which is one of the leaders in data analysis software with it's huge range of data visualizations, is one of the technology partners and is providing support for data analysis from DataMarket. Check out the announcement of integration between Tableau and DataMarket from here.

To have a first look at the DataMarket section of Windows Azure Market Place, check out this video.

What is Microsoft Codename Dallas and how is it associated with Microsoft Business Intelligence ?

I would term Dallas as a new potential Amazon.com in the making for content-as-a-service on the cloud computing platform. Here is how one should try out a hands-on experience on Dallas. Before planning or expecting anything from this platform, keep in view it is still in alpha phase and not even in betas. So just expect to get a feel of what it is going to offer, and not a full-fledged working product.

Firstly, in order to get access to Dallas, one needs to get access the Dallas Developer Portal. It's still not in the phase of open-for-all where anyone can sign up and get access. As of now, we can get access to Dallas as on invitation basis. Go to this portal, request your invitation code (its just a matter of dropping an email with a request to receive invitation code). Generally one should receive the invitation code on the very next day.

Log on to this portal, and you would be provided your account key. Save this key securely at some place, though this would remain available to you on your account home page on this potal. This key is important as this would be used as a kind of GUID for billing and reporting. The question that comes now is billing what and report what ? This is the next part of Dallas.

As per what I understand and anticipate is that, Dallas would offer content in the form of structured datasets from a lot of content providers in the form of a service. These content providers would be business houses, who would provide respective content which can be images, text or any blob kind of data to their subscribers. Using Dallas, one can subscribe to their service of choice.

Presently this portal provides a "Catalog" tab which shows a list of service providers to which we can subscribe. Subscription is free for the trial period. After you have subscribed, there is another tab called "Subscriptions" where you would be able to find your subscriptions. Under each subscription, you would be able to find a link that says "Click here to explore the dataset". Once you click on it, you would be able taken to Service Explorer page where it provides a set of parameters to specify your criteria and a few action buttons to view the data. This can be thought of much like a accessing or testing an invoked web-service. You can preview the data, as well as download it to analyze with powerpivot (provided if it's installed on your machine). The dataset that this service provider would return, would be limited to 100 records which is limit set for the trial. One nice thing is that it offers the service class readily to download to that service, so developers can just add a reference to it in their applications and business can start accessing it in their own hosted environment.

The last tab on this portal is the "Access Report" tab. On this tab you can view the reports of how many times you accessed each subscription service. And to the best of my thinking, you would be charged as per the usage of each subscription. I have not learned much about the pricing policy, so can't comment really much about it.

Finally it comes to how this can be used for Business Intelligence. Business Analysts keep of accessing and aggregating data from different sources, and most of the premium content providers charge a fees for the subscription. One of the best examples is in the Equity Research Business, where data from a lot of sources is studied for each equity. The same concept can be used here but it should be pay-as-per-use in my understanding. Using the cloud platform, applications and data storage can all be hosted and stored on the cloud instead of investing IT resources for the same. And using tools like powerpivot, data from various different business sources can be aggregated and analyzed without investing major IT resources for the same.

Still this does not eliminate the need of IT technology workers (coz I am one of them), as they would be the one who would be facilitating this setup for the business in IT environment to reduce manual efforts and program regular analysis routines !!

Microsoft Codename Dallas and Powerpivot

When powerpivot was introduced, the power of analytics that it brought to Excel and Sharepoint hosted content was spectacular. The point where I didn't feel something in place was, what would powerpivot analyze and when analytics is generally facilitated for MIS systems right out of data warehouse and cubes, would powerpivot really come to that much use for the business analysts keeping the flag of Self-Service BI still waving ?

One of the interesting use of powerpivot came to my attention when I saw use of powerpivot with Microsoft Codename Dallas. Dallas is still in the alpha version, and seems to be an interesting concept. It can be thought of as a potential new tiny Amazon.com in the market place of service subscription business.

Any business that is providing it's content in the form of service can partner with Microsoft and take advantage of the Microsoft's sales channel. Microsoft would provide these services via Dallas, which users can subscribe by paying for the required subscriptions. Content from these services would be made available in a structured format (like in the form of a dataset or in Excel) to the subscribers.

This content can then by readily analyzed using Powerpivot. This is a very interesting part of cloud computing, and powerpivot comes to its most appropriate use for business intelligence, in my views. Powerpivot of course is a very powerful mechanism to analyze huge data in a way that was not possible just using excel, but that felt much more like an add-on to me instead of real time business intelligence. But now when data from Dallas can be analyzed by joining with other sources of data using powerpivot, this is what I feel is real business intelligence.