Is Excel integration a new standard feature for business intelligence software?
Of course, there is another vendor in the mix. At Microsoft’s first BI conference, company representatives showed off the native BI capabilities of many Office 2007 products. The “economic model” is a major differentiator, as is a “tight fidelity” between Excel and SQL Server data sources, Alex Payne, group product manager, Microsoft Office Business Applications, said during an interview at the event. “We have a different approach when we say [BI features] are just part of Excel,” Payne said. “It’s not a separate add-on that you pay for — we’re providing BI natively inside Excel.” In fact, Microsoft’s new messaging around pervasive BI and use of Office as a BI interface may put even more pressure on the market, Hagerty said. Organizations may be more compelled to leverage Office for BI — accelerating the trend and demanding that other BI vendors keep pace. He predicts that Excel integration will soon become a standard feature for BI platforms. That said, Excel features alone probably
