New Microsoft product to tackle business reports

[mazzy]

Microsoft revealed plans on Monday for a new software product designed to let workers slice and dice sales, accounting and other key business data.

Microsoft expects to deliver the beta version of the new product--code-named Maestro--in September, Lewis Levin, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Office Business Applications, told a group of reporters. A select group of users is now testing the product, he said.

"It's part of a broadening set of investments we're making in business intelligence," Levin said of the product.

The Maestro project comes out of Microsoft's previous foray into the "business-intelligence" software market with a couple of free products: Reporting Services for SQL Server and Business Scorecard Accelerator. The company plans to charge a license fee for Maestro, but executives were not ready to discuss prices on Monday.

Microsoft views business-intelligence software as a $3 billion to $4 billion-a-year market, Levin said. Maestro is aimed directly at the top companies in that field, including Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, he added. They each make programs that deliver reports and alerts to business managers, indicating how a company is tracking with sales and profit targets and other performance goals, such as returns, warrantee claims and discounting levels.

Maestro requires the use of several other Microsoft programs, including the company’s database program, SQL Server, and SharePoint, a data-sharing tool. The Maestro software resides largely on a server, rather than a desktop PC. Customers can also feed Maestro with data from other business systems, such as SAP, Oracle and Siebel Systems programs, Levin said.

Maestro is an improvement on the free software it is based upon in several ways, Levin said. It can work with more data sources, is easier to design and set up, and is more user-friendly and interactive, he said.

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[mazzy]

Claiming it represents a significant step forward in its business intelligence strategy, Microsoft on Tuesday is selectively introducing the first beta of Maestro, a code name for a server-based application that helps corporate users build scorecards to monitor and improve company performance.

The strategic intent of Maestro is to drive down business intelligence capabilities to the desktop so customers can use the applications associated with Microsoft's Office System to better track their company's performance relative to the overall goals they have set for themselves, company officials said.

"It [Maestro] basically moves business intelligence from being report-centric to being more metric-centric, meaning managers and their workers who want to view KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can do it via a Web page," said Chris Caren, General Manager at Microsoft's Office Business Applications Group. "And because it is built into the Office System and SharePoint, it has collaboration capabilities that let users analyze performance with their peers," he said.

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[mazzy]

Microsoft Office System пополняется новым инструментом для работы с ключевыми показателями эффективности бизнеса

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