New Product for Performance Management

PerformancePoint 2007, a new performance management, financial reporting, and budgeting application, will ship mid-2007 and add one more weapon to Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) arsenal, supplementing the company’s widely adopted SQL Server BI platform with a variety of BI applications for end users. While the new product will further squeeze traditional BI players, such as Business Objects and Cognos, it presents opportunities for systems integrators to help customers deploy the product and integrate it with their data sources.

What Does Performance Management Mean?

Performance management refers generically to the processes used by companies to measure and track business performance against goals or objectives. Typically, this involves extracting information from core business systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases, and presenting that information to users in such a way that metrics, success criteria, and progress toward them are easily discernable. Whether formally implemented or not, all modern businesses practice some form of performance management—at a minimum, all companies track financial results, for instance.