Tom Casey on Microsoft’s BI Strategy

SQL Server Magazine: Shifting gears a bit: Can you give us your perspective on using BI with the SQL Azure platform?

Casey: We recently made some announcements about Windows Azure and SQL Azure: Starting in January, SQL Azure is broadly available for public deployments. Our roadmap says that we’ll continue to deliver additional platform services in that data platform tier under SQL Azure. The first offering is focused on the relational capabilities; subsequently we’ll add reporting and analytics. We’ll add BI in a way that it surfaces in the right places. So you may see end-user experiences surfacing through Office online, and the back end of that being served out of analytics running in SQL Azure.

SQL Server Magazine: So will these announcements be forthcoming this year?

Casey: This year, we’re focused around what’s coming with the compelling set of releases in the first half of the year: Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. We’ll begin talking about the roadmap for the next wave of things that we do in the cloud. In BI, most organizations are still struggling with getting their data together and making it usable inside the firewall.

We’re just seeing SQL Azure take off—the ability for someone to provision a database in the cloud and be up and running. Suddenly it’s there, and you don’t have to publish it to anybody else and move it around. It’s available from anywhere from any device. And it’s hugely powerful. Now bring that to your reports. Now bring that to your analytics. It’s just a natural evolution.

SQL Server Magazine: It’s a new year and a new decade for BI. Based on the past 10 years, can you venture a few predictions about where BI will be at the end of the next decade?

Casey: We were the first vendor to integrate OLAP Services right next to the data store. We did that with SQL Server 7.0, and we still have the leading OLAP server on the market. Good things have happened: There’s been consolidation of tools and consolidation in the market. But BI is still only reaching 10 to 20 percent of users in an organization. I’m pleased, but I’m not at all satisfied. The future’s going to be about delivering not just capabilities and applications to an organization, but rich, compelling experiences. I’ll be greatly disappointed if we end this new decade without BI at least having doubled in terms of its value to an organization and the number of users it reaches to take advantage of it. I won’t be surprised if people are accessing BI through any application that’s delivered anywhere, whether it’s on the cloud, on premises, or on a device. And they won’t even know that it’s BI. I think 10 years from now we’ll be talking about BI as a natural part of business productivity and application usage. Today, we’re still talking about a separate thing called BI. You need it to become part of the infrastructure of IT and part of the implicit IP [intellectual property] of information workers. It needs to become how businesses are agile and productive.

I think we’re on the cusp of a major change right now. It’s a pivotal point. It harkens back to your question about SharePoint earlier, where people have accepted applications and information in their organization as coming through a portal and not littered across a bunch of file shares or discrete applications. It means that there’s a place where users connect to users and users connect to data. Now we can drive a different kind of transformation—from where BI was something separate toward where it is truly integrated in applications. And that’s exciting to me. That’s what our mission really is.

SQL Server Magazine: It looks like we have another exciting 10 years to look forward to!