PerformancePointing: 2014

PerformancePoint started out at Microsoft as a tool called Business Scorecard Manager 2005, and before that as an internal tool used for planning. Companies at the time (or at least Steve Ballmer) were crying out for a decent way to gather Key Performance Indicators from various sources and present them in a well-formulated dashboard. Third-party vendors or custom code were usually the only options. Microsoft released this version 1 product to some very positive feedback at the partner conference I attended in Bellevue. It took numbers from Excel, SQL Server, and Analysis Services (flat, relational, multidimensional) and combined them with a tool that any executive in finance could understand.

I produced some early prototypes based on this software with mixed results. Since it wasn't quite ready for prime-time, the glitches and awkwardness of using the product were readily apparent. It really took a developer with an understanding of financial systems to create these dashboards, when Microsoft was trying to offload this task on non-IT staff.

Next comes 2006, and after a couple of acquisitions Office PerformancePoint 2007 is launched. Microsoft was becoming a serious thorn in the side of companies like Cognos and BusinessObjects, with its combination of Planning, Monitoring, and shortly afterwards Proclarity. It was around this time I became a certified PerformancePoint trainer, prototyped, trained staff, and implemented the software at various Canadian companies. I was looking forward to seeing how Microsoft could integrate tools like Data Explorer (anyone remember that one?) with Proclarity and PerformancePoint, to create the ultimate multidimensional client.

PerformancePoint 2007 was a standalone product, in that it stood alone with a forest of other Microsoft products required for a successful implementation. Windows Enterprise Server, SQL Server Enterprise, Analysis Services, SSIS (there was very limited built-in data integration), Sharepoint, Office, Reporting Services, and a few add-ins and smart clients. Just about the only thing it didn't require was Flight Simulator, which was unfortunate because I was working right next to an airport and could have kicked off my aviation career.

In 2009, Microsoft discontinued PerformancePoint. And Proclarity. And a few other products. For me it was an upsetting year, as Flight Simulator was also discontinued. Not to mention a client whom we had great success implementing the software with launched the same day the announcement was made. Luckily for me the client still saw the power of the tool and continued to build on it, integrating a recent acquisition's 500 locations worth of data for enterprise financial reporting. They are still using it to this day, though its days are numbered.

In 2010, PerformancePoint Planning was long gone. PerformancePoint Monitoring (or PerformancePoint Services as it is called in Sharepoint 2013) became a pillar in the Sharepoint stack of services. Microsoft's planning product was to be rolled into Dynamics sometime in the future, with Excel cube writeback being the stopgap replacement. Switching my focus between PerformancePoint and other tools around the Analysis Services stack, the planning product slowly faded from my memory.

That's not to say BI at Microsoft is dead. Excel Services was trumped as the solution to serving up spreadsheets on the web. This was truly distributed computing for Excel. My favourite Excel Services visualization was the data refresh flowchart.

With the departure of a few key people from the Analysis Services team, and the emergence of another, multidimensional mode Analysis Services became sidelined by PowerPivot. With its in-memory, compressed, high performing columnar storage engine, it blew away many of the performance metrics where the standard multidimensional cubes lagged. And it brought Excel into the world of the million-row spreadsheet.