Ten years ago, Microsoft revolutionized business intelligence (BI) by making OLAP accessible to the IT professional right in the SQL Server relational database product. Now the company wants to make BI available throughout an organization. What’s next for BI? Tom Casey, the Microsoft general manager for SQL Server BI, met with SQL Server Magazine’s Technical Director Michael Otey and Executive Editor Sheila Molnar to discuss Microsoft’s BI strategy—the history of BI, its vital role in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, and its future. For an in-depth look at the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, watch for our SQL Server 2008 R2 new features article in the June issue of SQL Server Magazine.
SQL Server Magazine: When we spoke with Donald Farmer in 2009, we asked him about his background, and we’d like to start there with you as well. Did you move from being a relational database guy to a BI guy? How did that happen?
Tom Casey: I was a file server database guy for a long time. I worked on embedded systems, and then I transitioned to relational databases prior to coming to Microsoft to work on SQL Server 7.0. I focused on our relational technologies, on replication, and on distributed computing. Working on file systems and embedded systems early on, I got the notion of connection to the end user that’s critical for BI. So when the opportunity came to work on making accumulated relational data [available] to more users, which is a big part of BI, I jumped at it. It’s an exciting convergence.
SQL Server Magazine: Can you tell us more about your role as the leader of the cross-group BI effort at Microsoft? Can you describe how this virtual team works and how that effort is progressing?
Casey: We focus on making BI pervasive and available to everyone. We want users to get value out of the data that they already have, but we also want to turn that data into broadly available information that informs daily business productivity. We don’t want to deliver a suite that requires specialized training and tools for BI; we want to deliver something that’s ingrained in the tools that people use every day. Not just the tools that the information worker uses in Office, but also SharePoint as the infrastructure that the IT professional relies upon, and SQL Server as a mission-critical platform for the whole thing. We don’t want specialization in the stack because it gets in the way of users consuming and getting value out of what they need.
At Microsoft, we’ve organized ourselves so that we don’t deliver BI in just one team but we do it in a virtual team comprised of leaders and developers in Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server. We drive a holistic virtual engineering team. First, we identified key leaders—general managers in the Access, Excel, and SharePoint teams; me in SQL Server; a marketing counterpart and a distinguished engineer, Amir Netz. We focus on BI as a whole for Microsoft, giving teams guiding principles on the necessary priorities. We work closely to make sure that what we’re delivering is consistent and compelling. There are end-to-end scenarios or experiences that guide what we’re doing in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release. We communicate those things broadly and make sure that we’re adhering to those principles. We’re shipping Office 2010 at the same time that we’re shipping SQL Server 2008 R2. It’s the first time in 10 years that we’ve shipped those two products together.
SQL Server Magazine: What’s Microsoft’s strategic thinking behind BI in SQL Server 2008 R2?
Casey: The strategic initiative here is to make sure we serve the needs of all the roles in the organization. The consumers of BI, the IT professionals that put the systems and infrastructure together, and the developers and analysts who build the solutions that people consume. We deliver it in the right place in the stack so that you have familiar tools and the right tools. We’re aligning release cycles and development efforts to make sure that BI comes through as a set of holistic experiences from Microsoft. It is a key thing that will differentiate us from what other organizations do.
SQL Server Magazine: How does an organization get started with BI? Do they have to become OLAP experts?
Casey: There’s a much faster path available for them. Requiring the whole organization—the IT professional, the developer, and the end user—to become experts in a tool that’s specialized for an OLAP engine is an inhibitor. The SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot add-in for Excel lets users simply start working in Excel, an environment that they’re familiar with. We’ve masked the fact that there’s a very powerful OLAP engine underneath. People will start with experiences that are ingrained in their daily work, and they won’t have that abrupt sense of making a transition to becoming a BI developer or BI user.
Making this seamless is key to our information platform vision. The second thing that provides a faster path is reporting. In the past, reporting has been separate but related: You build your application, and then you build your reports. You never got any leverage between the two. By driving to a common model, user-accessible tools, and a shared platform infrastructure for reporting and OLAP, we made it possible to build a BI solution and generate a report off of it with the new Report Builder. And vice versa—you can take a report that’s off of relational data and turn it into a data feed that lets you do rich analysis.