Some may dismiss the potential of business intelligence as nothing more than a fairytale. But try telling that to Ted Kummert. 

Kummert runs the Business Platform Division at Microsoft which is responsible for developing Microsoft's application platform, including SQL Server and its application server products and technologies.

"Fairytales are great stories, good wins out over evil, people find true love, dragons are slain. And they're wonderful stories because they're stories we all want to believe," he declares. "The fairytale of business intelligence told the story of a future where every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively.

"There's something absolutely magical that happens when business intelligence works. When an end user with a question gains the insight they need to move forward, business moves forward and people are more effective in their jobs. That's the thing that you are all a part of making happen every day. It's a powerful thing to make others look good, to make people more effective at their jobs, to enable business to move forward in a new way. That's the magical thing that business intelligence can enable."

An untapped market

Kummert argues that although BI has been around for a long time, there's still a vast untapped market out there that has yet to be exposed to the potential of the technology. "The various industry analysts disagree in the fine grain, but most of them would agree that it's around 20% of the potential users of business intelligence that are able to use business intelligence today," he says. "So what's the problem with that? Well, frankly, the fact is there's a lot of problems that end users can and should be able to solve for themselves. We see a tremendous opportunity to enable the 80%, the rest, with the tools for them. Life gets better for everybody. Our vision is to enable BI for everyone, to take that step to enable BI for the 100%."

Kummert suggests that there are various stages in that enablement, beginning with a focus on the user experience. "You need to learn too much BI technology and terminology just to do simple tasks today," he explains. "I think of this as delivering the right tools for the right user in the right place. If I'm in Excel and I've got a task I need to get done, make it a simple extension of that Excel environment. Make it something that's very natural and intuitive for me to do. I've got a task to accomplish. I don't need to learn about star schemas and other technology in order to get that thing done. If I'm a professional user, I want to live in Visual Studio. If I'm an end user that lives in a line-of-business application for most of my time, I want to see those visualisations and reports surface seamlessly embedded within that experience."

Collaboration is also essential. "Business intelligence applications are just like any other business document," says Kummert. "You want to be able to do everything you can do with any other document in your environment. You want to search, you want to find. You want to be able to share and collaborate. You want to be able to build on the work of others. You want to initiate work flows around these documents, to root them around. You want to apply rights management to them. Everything I can do with a document today, I want to do with structured data in my business intelligence applications as well."

Adding value

Finally there's the need to enable IT investment to add value. "IT adds value by managing the infrastructure," suggests Kummert. "The infrastructure is always there for every end user to tap into. By managing the applications, by providing the data stewardship and the data governance, everybody's building on data that they trust from trusted sources, quality data. BI for everyone comes together by enabling the right tool for the right user in the right place, enabling seamless collaboration in an infrastructure that's managed by IT."

That's the status quo in the BI market, but there are innovations coming along the track that will move BI technologies into new areas. "Everybody's talking about the Cloud. A lot of the discussions on the Cloud centre on the infrastructure-level benefits, and that's correct because the benefits there are transformational," says Kummert. "But there's also implications for the user experience. We've seen with the self-service user experience, which puts the end user at the centre, they're managing their applications and data and someone else is managing the infrastructure, and they never see that. Whether that infrastructure is hosted by you and your data centre, but one of our partners, or by us and our public Cloud offering. Cloud Computing brings the need for these kind of rich, self-service end-user experiences.

"We're in market today with Business Productivity Online Services. We're in market with the Windows Azure platform, which includes SQL Azure. If you want to think about kind of the guiding principle for how we're moving forward on these offerings, think of the principle of consistency. Think about consistent capabilities, a consistent platform, consistent application platform, consistent identity model, consistent tools. Everybody's going to be able to use their skills, their assets, their knowledge in using our Cloud services. Our intent is to offer all the capabilities of SQL Server in SQL Azure and that includes reporting and analytics."

The consumerisation of IT

The consumerisation of IT will also have an impact, argues Kummert. "A lot of things happen first on the web. They happen first in the consumer scenarios, but then it becomes very natural for us as that becomes the way we interact with things, for that to be the way we interact with things in our work lives as well," he suggests. "Consider search. Years ago, we were just using search to access information on the public Internet. Now we use it everywhere to access information within our own enterprise. Now we're bringing BI seamlessly into that same search experience.

"Consider social media. We're bringing BI into the SharePoint environment, enabling sharing and collaboration, but we saw tagging and ranking and that kind of social media experience, which is — really enriches the experience for end users. We think generally about investing in more immersive user experiences as well. How much more compelling is it to have seen that data laid out in a map using the mapping control in SQL Server 2008 R2 than it is to look at that data in a list by region or by state? It's much more compelling. You're more compelled to use it, and it enables you to gain more insight."

A final consideration is the increasing volume of data that has to be dealt with by organisations. "We all know where this is coming from. This is from higher transactional rates, this is from different types and shapes of data that we want to include," says Kummert. "It's different sources of data, data from sensor networks, RFID. You need platforms that can store that high amount of scale and allow you to analyse those types and shapes of data on that scale.

"Later this year, we'll be releasing the first version of our parallel data warehouse edition of SQL Server. This will add scale-out data warehousing to the SQL Server product family. This will take SQL Server to the hundreds of terabytes in data warehousing. You'll have one solution now that you can use from the large kind of enterprise single version of the truth, mission-critical data warehouse to the surrounding data warehouses and data marts to the surrounding reporting and analytics work loads. It's one platform for IT; it's one platform for end users."

So does the BI fairytale end happily ever after? "Did we slay any dragons? Did people find true love? I don't know," admits Kummert. "BI technologies can be used by more end users than there are today. They can get a lot of things done that they ask you to do. Business intelligence is so empowering. I mean, it truly is magical. You make people look better. They now know something they didn't know before. They have some insight they didn't have. They're going to be more effective at their jobs tomorrow. Business is going to be better. It's tremendously empowering. And with the last couple of years of this economic climate we've been in, the priority on this type of solution has only increased."