Acquisition Nets BI Tools

The acquisition of former partner Stratature nets Microsoft tools and technologies for centrally managing the dimensions and hierarchies organizations use to characterize and analyze business functions, such as sales and supply chain operations. The acquired tools will likely be used to supplement the forthcoming PerformancePoint Server 2007 financial and business performance reporting application, better suiting that application for large, distributed organizations with complex or frequently changing financial and reporting structures. However, Microsoft has not yet described how or when it will make the acquired tools available and has removed them from the market in the interim.

What Did Microsoft Get?

In June 2007 Microsoft acquired the assets of Stratature Inc., which include the former company’s main application, called +EDM. +EDM provided user tools, data storage and security services, and change control mechanisms that helped workers define and manage the dimensions used to characterize and analyze business operations and related data, and the hierarchies that specify how dimensions are organized. Dimensions and hierarchies are the main analysis axes in business intelligence (BI) tools, such as data warehouses and the SQL Server Analysis Services online analytical processing (OLAP) engine.