Microsoft's (un)secret weapon for winning the BI battle
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
SQL Server may be one of the most popular databases today, but Microsoft nevertheless remains a laggard in the business intelligence market. It ranked just fifth among BI vendors last year, according to research firm IDC.
But as Microsoft gets serious about BI, it has an ace that turns out to have been hiding in plain sight all along.
The software maker's ubiquitous spreadsheet Excel is already the most popular front-end program used by business analysts and others who want to analyze and display the results of their BI queries, according to Forrester analyst James Kobielus.