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    Microsoft Office Offers No Bargain as BI, CRM Platform

    By
    John Pallatto
    -
    November 2, 2005
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      With both its business intelligence and customer relationship management strategies, Microsoft is attempting to make its Office desktop productivity suite the Swiss Army knife of enterprise applications.

      On the face of it this seems to make a lot of sense because it provides a familiar way for users to get information into and out of the business intelligence and CRM applications.

      Any CRM system is naturally going to bring into play all Office applications, whether it is Excel spreadsheets for reports and analysis, Word for correspondence, Outlook for communicating with customers, or PowerPoint for marketing presentations.

      It should be just as easy to move raw data out of Excel spreadsheets into business intelligence or CRM applications. It should be equally easy to extract relevant data from Word documents, whether it is customer addresses, order tallies, part numbers or anything that could serve as fodder for compilation and analysis in BI and CRM applications.

      But this doesnt seem like the most efficient or elegant way to provide a set of integrated business management tools. It perpetuates an expanding layer of complexity that requires a costly investment in applications and servers.

      Microsofts approach with the advent of Office 12 will require a heavy reinvestment in new software—servers and applications—that wont necessarily give users quick access to cost-effective BI and CRM capabilities.

      Users would be much better served by a simpler, more elegant solution in which the data and analysis applications are close at hand, little more than applets or widgets that allow users to compile and display data in charts and graphs.

      /zimages/2/28571.gifClick here to read the details about Microsofts recently announced business intelligence strategy.

      Most of the software business is still focused on how much software it can sell at prices customers will tolerate. The industry would sell software by the pound if it could weigh it. Customers would rather have something fast, compact, simple and easy to learn and pay a fee that resembles the value the software delivers to the business.

      Microsoft says one of its goals is to make business intelligence more pervasive inside organizations because currently only about 20 percent of business users can benefit from using it. Its also true that most of current-generation BI products are big, bulky and expensive systems that require a lot of effort to get a significant return on investments.

      Next Page: Searching for simplicity.

      Alternative Solutions

      But the Microsoft solution is looking just as big, bulky, expensive and complex and wont necessarily make sophisticated business intelligence pervasive in enterprises large and small because it is the most elegant solution on the market. It is counting on its ability to persuade at least a substantial fraction of the 500 million business people it claims are using the Office applications to implement its business intelligence tools.

      /zimages/2/28571.gifRead more here about how Office 12 will anchor Microsofts business intelligence strategy.

      That represents a captive audience that Microsoft is counting on to upgrade to Office 12 and spend more to implement additional BI data management components such as SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services and the SharePoint Portal Server.

      Microsoft has said that it will introduce a new round of server products with the release of Office 12 due in the second half of 2006 that will provide even more sales and application integration opportunities.

      CRM is already much more pervasive in that most organizations already have some kind of computer tools in place to support sales, marketing and communicating with customers. And much of these are basic applications developed in-house using Microsoft Office spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.

      What might really help make business intelligence more pervasive is if enterprises had ready access to secure, on-demand BI tools where users could quickly run a wide range of analysis routines without having to worry about that massive upfront cost of acquiring, building and implementing BI tools running on top of a variety of specialized servers or data warehouses.

      /zimages/2/28571.gifClick here to read Charles Garrys commentary on why using Office 12 as a BI platform will perpetuate the “stealth IT group” and further compromise enterprise data management.

      IT and line-of-business executives might be appalled at the idea of moving proprietary market data offsite to a hosted application service. But if enterprises have gotten used to storing and processing the CRM data offsite, then it cant be that huge a leap to start running business intelligence applications offsite.

      Moving from on-demand CRM to on-demand business intelligence is a natural progression because all that good customer service data is just a mother lode of raw information just waiting to be mined by business intelligence tools.

      On-demand CRM service providers have already made some tentative steps in this direction, and it is a business opportunity that wont lie fallow for long.

      Once it catches on, it will be a strong alternative to Microsofts Swiss Army knife approach of integrating Office with BI and CRM functions.

      John Pallatto is a veteran journalist in the field of enterprise software and Internet technology. He can be reached at [email protected]

      /zimages/2/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis about productivity and business solutions.

      John Pallatto
      John Pallatto has been editor in chief of QuinStreet Inc.'s eWEEK.com since October 2012. He has more than 40 years of experience as a professional journalist working at a daily newspaper and computer technology trade journals. He was an eWEEK managing editor from 2009 to 2012. From 2003 to 2007 he covered Enterprise Application Software for eWEEK. From June 2007 to 2008 he was eWEEK’s West Coast news editor. Pallatto was a member of the staff that launched PC Week in March 1984. From 1992 to 1996 he was PC Week’s West Coast Bureau chief. From 1996 to 1998 he was a senior editor with Ziff-Davis Internet Computing Magazine. From 2000 to 2002 Pallatto was West Coast bureau chief with Internet World Magazine. His professional journalism career started at the Hartford Courant daily newspaper where he worked from 1974 to 1983.

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