SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence Available

The new SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence (SSABI) gives Microsoft customers and partners a basic tool for parlaying their industry expertise into business intelligence (BI) solutions, which extract high-level decision-making data from an organization’s raw transaction data. SSABI can be used for rapidly building prototypes, or for training in BI development. Building on Microsoft’s successful efforts to gain market share for SQL Server in the BI or “analytics” market, SSABI lowers the threshold for starting a BI project by configuring both a SQL Server back end and an Office front end so that customers can more easily identify business trends and relationships from their desktop PCs.

Designing BI Applications

One of the few software sectors that was relatively unscathed by the economic woes of the last year (IDC estimates that it grew about 20% in 2001), BI is a growing focus for Microsoft. As organizations increasingly store information in digital form, BI is emerging as a popular way for organizations to reduce costs and gain business advantages by making better use of data that they already own.