SQL Server Magazine: So the folks that you would recommend upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 would be BI users and power users?
Farmer: We recommend that every SQL Server user upgrade to SQL Server 2008. For SQL Server 2008 R2 it’s much more than a BI refresh. Look for more announcements later on in the year. There are advantages for many different types of users. Naturally, I focused on the BI user. SQL Server 2008 R2 is a great environment for people who just haven’t gotten ‘round to doing BI. BI penetration is only about 20 percent to 25 percent. In the Microsoft world, it’s a little bit higher. Lots of enterprises would love to do BI, but they don’t have an IT team in place to do that. They think that there’s a lot of extra provisioning. They think it needs a lot of extra skills. But people who haven’t even considered BI could actually do BI by upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2. It’s a very compelling point.
SQL Server Magazine: We’ve done instant polls that have looked at the penetration of BI among our readers and seen that about 30 percent of readers are really into BI, and they’re expert BI users. But about two-thirds of readers really aren’t into BI, and they’re struggling with how to adopt it. So what does Gemini offer that can help those readers get started with BI?
Farmer: What these people need to understand is that the number one priority for CIOs according to Gartner last year is BI. [See "Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of 1,500 CIOs Shows 85 Percent of CIOs Expect 'Significant Change' Over Next Three Years" for more information.] A couple of years ago it used to be security. So your CIO has BI as a top priority and two-thirds of your readers are not that into it. There’s a demand!
SQL Server Magazine: They see the value in it but oftentimes they think the skill sets are beyond them.
Farmer: With Gemini, IT provides and manages the infrastructure, but it’s the users who provide the business intelligence. Let’s take a vertical about which I know nothing, which would be banking. To understand banking, you need to understand the business model. I’m not surprised that there’s a barrier to the adoption of BI when you need to have a degree in banking as well as a degree in computer science. With Gemini, I provide what I know. IT provides the infrastructure and the IT support. The banking intelligence comes from the bankers. And they can serve themselves to it. But not in a chaotic way—IT still manages the compliance and security. I think that those two-thirds of your readers will actually find Gemini a huge breakthrough.
SQL Server Magazine: Do you think this lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of SQL Server?
Farmer: TCO comes down for a very important reason. TCO in the Microsoft world—we have a great value proposition—is one of the reasons we’re growing so rapidly in the BI world. Actually preparing the infrastructure, the hardware, that’s always been relatively low cost. Self-service BI empowers end users to provide a lot of services themselves, thus lowering that cost.
There’s a peer-to-peer review system for Gemini workbooks published onto the server. It’s actually a social environment. It’s like Facebook for data. There’s a rating and a comment system. People trust a report on sales figures not because they understand the lineage of the data and the calculations but because they trust the person who built it. Taking a set of reports and determining which are good and which are bad based on looking at the detailed lineage and analysis—that’s the IT domain.
SQL Server Magazine: So there’s a SharePoint and a social media aspect of Gemini.
Farmer: SharePoint has workflow built in. You can build workflow in to your Gemini analysis. An information worker does the work—pools all the data, brings it from multiple sources, mashes it up, creates a pivot table, and publishes it to SharePoint. Now there can be an IT-administered workflow that requires the report to be signed off by somebody in IT before other people can collaborate on it.
SQL Server Magazine: Is there any tie-in to the Madison project?
Farmer: Madison is a separate track from Gemini. Madison is this highly scalable environment for IT to serve massive data warehousing environments. The tie-in to Gemini is that it’s all part of Microsoft’s effort to increase scalability and add to the richness of the analytic experience. In the future, some of the very, very smart technologies behind Gemini—the in-memory data stores, for example—we can see them migrating into some of those environments as well and bringing some of those advantages to the relational world, potentially. So there’s certainly a roadmap for some of these technologies to merge in the future. We’re working on that just now—watch this space!