New Performance Management Product Released

PerformancePoint Server 2007, a collection of three business intelligence (BI) applications released in Sept. 2007, could help large organizations streamline financial reporting and budgeting, visualize business data, and analyze and report details about business performance. PerformancePoint could also strengthen Microsoft’s hand in the increasingly hot BI applications market, which has seen major acquisitions in 2007 by Oracle and SAP. However, the combination of incomplete documentation and PerformancePoint’s complexity could challenge early adopters that jump in without the assistance of a knowledgeable partner.

Collection of Applications for Performance Management

PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a collection of server and client applications, database components, and business user utilities that support corporate performance management, a loosely defined bit of corporate jargon that refers to the processes that organizations use to track and report important business measures (which can range from individual and team goals to companywide financial results) and improve overall business health and performance. Typically, performance management applications such as PerformancePoint aid these processes by extracting, consolidating, and summarizing information from strategic business data sources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and presenting that information to users in a form that makes important goals and progress toward them easily discernable.