Garrett Tedeman, MBA, CPA

On Friday, January 23rd, Microsoft announced their new “BI Strategy” in which the main planning component of PPS will receive one further update in SP3 in June, but will have no further development after that point.

Specifically, this will affect two component pieces.  The Planning Business Modeler and the Excel Add-in.  The Monitoring & Analytics, Dashboarding, and ProClarity pieces will be rolled into Sharepoint Server beginning on April 1st.  More from The BI Blog:

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Microsoft BI Strategy Update

Hi everyone,

I wanted to provide an important update on the Microsoft BI strategy!  For over ten years we’ve been on a mission to deliver BI to everyone in the organization, and have made strides towards achieving this goal through the broadly adopted tools of SharePoint, Excel, and the SQL Server BI platform. 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. This move helps us extend our vision to deliver BI more broadly to everyone in the organization at a lower total cost of ownership.  Our customers keep telling us—my IT spend is not going up—how can you help me?  Well, help has officially arrived!

Now you might be wondering what will happen with rest of PerformancePoint Server?  In mid 2009, we will release PerformancePoint Server 2007 “Service Pack 3” which will include updates to the product’s planning module. Thereafter, our customers and partners should not expect further investment in standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server.  Throughout this process the support of our planning customers is our top priority.  But in the end, these changes enable our customers around the world to deploy a complete BI solution in many cases with existing investments in SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Excel, the most widely used analysis and planning tool in market today!

Want more information?  Take a few minutes and watch this video with Guy Weismantel, Director of Microsoft BI. In it, Guy explains these changes and the future value Microsoft customers will gain from this strategy.

Yep, that’s Billion with a capital “B”.  This is the largest set of corporate fines ever assessed against an individual company, exceeding even the monopoly conviction that Microsoft was hit with a couple of years ago.  That one was around $500 million.

The fines were for criminal bribery, kickbacks and slush funds used by Siemens to secure public works projects around the world:

WASHINGTON — Officials said that Siemens, beginning in the mid-1990s, used bribes and kickbacks to foreign officials to secure government contracts for projects like a national identity card project in Argentina, mass transit work in Venezuela, a nationwide cellphone network in Bangladesh and a United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq under Saddam Hussein .

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/worldbusiness/16siemens.html?em