News

Products: Microsoft Shutters PerformancePoint Server

Microsoft plans to discontinue its business intelligence product.

• By Michael Desmond
• March 01, 2009

The move came just after Microsoft's dismal Q2 earnings report, which included a weakened outlook and a plan to slash 5,000 jobs. Microsoft will ship a Service Pack 3 update to PerformancePoint Server 2007 around the middle of this year before closing the book on the BI package.

News of the closure slipped out via a blog entry at Microsoft's BI site.

"Based on customer feedback, we're announcing today that Microsoft is consolidating the scorecard, dashboard and analytical capabilities from PerformancePoint Server into SharePoint Server as PerformancePoint Services, making these capabilities available to millions of SharePoint users around the world," wrote Microsoft Senior Product Manager Nic Smith.

"It's hard to deny that PerformancePoint didn't resonate with the market the way Microsoft had forecasted," says Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for consultancy twentysix New York. "But such missteps don't worry me as much as a failure to acknowledge them and make corrections, as Redmond has done here. And this is a great outcome: For the customer SharePoint just got better; for partners the installed base just grew significantly."

Consulting Relief
Brust notes the move may also be a relief to Microsoft's consulting partners, who sometimes struggled to fit PerformancePoint in with the rest of Microsoft's sales pitch.

"PerformancePoint was sometimes hard for us to work with because many of our customers were content with what they got in SQL, Excel and Excel Services and SharePoint. Now they won't have to choose," Brust says.