I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with Microsoft’s 2008 BI stack. I say pleasure because Microsoft has really pulled out the stops.  The architecture is sound, the performance is outstanding.  Gartner has ranked Microsoft’s BI offering in the top quartile of providers.  This puts them in the same league as Cognos (Oracle), Business Objects (SAP) and usual players in the space.  I have used Cognos and Business Objects in the past and have had the opportunity to use or see most of the other vendor offerings.   Each Vendor offers tradeoffs.  Below is my experience with Microsoft’s BI solution up to this point.

Microsoft’s BI offering is centered around SQL Server.  In this case my team and I used Microsoft server 2008 and SQL Server Enterprise 2008.  I wish I could tell you it was because we wanted to take advantage of the performance improvements, However our logic was simpler.  If you’re going to build a new stack just use the latest and greatest.  The most important thing to the team was to use SQL Server 2008 so that we could take advantage of what R2 was going to provide.

The first thing that really struck us was the modular nature of Microsoft’s strategy.  SQL Server is the core, but in terms of delivery Microsoft relies heavily on the fact that most business users utilize Microsoft Office as their main office productivity suite.  It’s a safe bet considering that Microsoft has an incredible penetration rate in this space.  However, external facing customers might prove to be challenging in terms of delivery.  We chose to put a proxy between our Reporting Services implementation and the outside world.  This allowed us to implement URL rewriting and offer another level of security.  Unlike Cognos, which offers an easy to implement portlet we had to custom make a solution for implementation into our ALUI portal engine.  Of course all of this can be solved if you just use Microsoft Share Point.  This was not an option for us.

Typically I’d view this module nature as being a hindrance, or even a lack of integration features.  What we ended up finding is this is actually a strength of the Microsoft BI stack.  Microsoft has a great API/services to access all the functionality.   Building out a custom solution for integration was not that bad compared to the limited options for customization that other vendors offer.  For example, Users can natively access cubes and analysis right from Excel 2007.  However, because the API was so rich, we chose to write our own ‘Excel tab’ to make accessing and running analysis functions as brain dead as possible.  A solution that users appreciate.

So far, as a strategic play, Microsoft’s BI offering is proving to be a good investment.

Sorry, I just had to post these.  Too Funny!

Today I was speaking with some co-workers about the various Cloud players out there.  Specifically we were talking about Microsoft's Azure service vs. other offerings like Amazon.  Amazon will actually give you full control over a virtual OS like Microsoft Server 2008 or Linux.  Essentially a VM.  Where as Microsoft’s offering requires you to code against an API to take advantage of its architecture.   The initial gut reaction to Microsoft’s implementation is why in the world would someone spend the time to specifically build an application to fit Microsoft’s Cloud?   You could just as easily make a VM and upload it to Amazon’s service?  Microsoft could easily implement the same with their Hyper-V virtualization technology.

Let’s assume for a second that Microsoft is looking beyond the public cloud.  Now this starts to make sense.  At the enterprise level there has to be some reservations about opening up applications to the public cloud.  I work in Healthcare and there is no way I could go to the CIO with a straight face and say that it’s a good idea to put all of our applications and data in the public cloud.  I imagine it’s much the same for banking, government, etc, etc. 

So let’s now look at what could be Microsoft’s strategy in terms of a private cloud.  Setup a cluster of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, and some cloud management servers and now you have a private cloud.  To deploy additional application resources you don’t need to spin up a new VM or physical box that needs to be named, patched, copied, assigned an IP or managed.  Your Production Support staff or automated system simply scales the application.  Additionally, license management for these resources is already taken care of at the cluster level.  How about licensing around CPU usage?  Now when your web apps run heavy between 9am and 8 pm they automatically scale out.  At night they are reduced.  SQL processes that run at night then scale up.  Disaster planning becomes a breeze.  Your large machines with tons of memory and cores should be fully utilized, not sitting idle eating up electricity and cooling resources.  It’s a great scenario, the OS and infrastructure are completely abstracted from the applications.  Now building applications that use the API make complete sense.

Microsoft swears that this will never happen.  Their current position is that Azure should be another ‘choice’ and should never be implemented at the clients site.  I would argue that there might be a high demand for it.  Enterprise application providers will eventually demand it.  I think Microsoft has an opportunity to introduce a real game changer in Enterprise Architecture because if they don’t, someone else will.

As an Enterprise Architect, would you ever be interested in a private cloud, or would you always use the public cloud?

I’ve read several articles about the benefits of Silverlight over Flash and I’ve actually done some development in both.  Silverlight is the clear winner in terms of power, but as one of my colleagues pointed out the other day does it matter?  His point was that Flash has an incredible penetration rate.  According to Adobe it’s in the 99% range.  When considering rolling out a new product that requires a plug-in why introduce another barrier to adoption?  Microsoft’s was reporting back in October 2008 that Silverlight’s penetration was ‘1 in 4’.  Meaning 25%.  That’s a heck of a lot for just becoming available.  My immediate reaction to my colleague’s response was that it actually wasn’t that important.  If you provide a ‘cool’ product people will install the plug-in.  Have you seen how many toolbars people have installed on their browsers lately? 

I also believe that Microsoft has a responsibility to its developer community to promote the plug-in as quickly as possible.  What type of responsibility do I think is appropriate?  Make it part of the Microsoft Update.  That’s right.  That’s 89.6% of the worlds computers.  An instant gain in market share.  Of course not everyone is using IE mind you, but it’s still significant.

Another thing Microsoft could do to boost penetration is buy Yahoo.  That’s right.  By purchasing Yahoo that would mean that Microsoft would own 3 out of the 5 largest web properties on the web.  #1 Yahoo at about 29%, #4 Live at 20% and #5 MSN at 15%.  That’s 65% of world wide web traffic according to Alexa.  That’s a lot of Silverlight installations.

Would this keep you from creating an application in Silverlight?

I finally had the time to site down and take a look at Microsoft’s Cloud platform Azure.  Initially when I first received my ‘Tokens’ I logged on to the site and was intimidated.  I would say it’s a little less then straight forward.  Tonight I actually took the time to look up some tutorials and read up on the offering.  So here you go My first application in the Cloud.  Not much to look at, but it was relatively simple to create a basic web application and deploy.

I’m still viewing and learning about the ‘Storage’ concept.   Stay tuned, I’m sure I’ll have a ‘Hello Cloud….I pulled [Insert Random Data here…] from the Cloud storage’.  Speaking of storage, one of the tutorials I was watching talked about state, and how Azure handles it.  My impression was that it’s very much like a state service you might create while building any old web farm. 

Improvements

Microsoft clearly needs to brand Azure a little better.  You have several choices of solutions, but nothing is clear as to what those services include, or their capabilities.  Additionally these services are not ‘hobbyist’ friendly.  I’m not sure they are even meant to be.  Perhaps they are marketing this to the Enterprise, but all their literature points to ‘If you have a startup or an idea…’.  The problem is, at least in the CPT, you have to build (read: plan) to use these services up front.  And converting from using straight ADO providers, or even the more recent MVC is not easy. Amazon offers a virtual Windows machine with Remote Desktop capabilities.  Much easier to use and port apps if you’re really looking for quick scalability.

Price

Microsoft’s position on pricing will be key to making inroads in this space.  I imagine eventually they’ll move to an OS agnostic capability so price will be the deciding factor.  If you know of any good price comparisons between the cloud providers  let me know!