Just over two years ago, BusinessObjects launched Information OnDemand, an online store allowing you to buy information from premium providers such as Dun & Bradstree, the US Census Bureau, NewsTin, etc.
And now Microsoft have launched their “Dallas” project, a variation on the same theme:
“Microsoft’s Information Services business, enabling developers and information workers to instantly find, purchase, and manage datasets to power the next set of applications—powered by premium content”
In today’s increasingly mashed-up world of analytics, let’s all hope that standards will emerge that will allow purchase and use of information from any data provider – so that any organization can choose to sell subsets of its information assets on the open market.
This will inevitably require big changes to data governance and authorization. How long before the copying and piracy problems that have beset the music industry start doing damage to business data sets?
Comments
3 responses to “Microsoft’s Dallas Copies BusinessObjects Information OnDemand”
I think Alex and Charles are missing the point of Timo’s post … you don’t need to have a “cloud” platform to provide “BI OnDemand” … what Business Object and, now, “SAP BusinessObjects” provides is the ability to use their BI tools on existing cloud services from a myriad of providers (D&B, US Census, etc.) — which is helpful for businesses looking to analyze information managed by these service providers
I agree with Alex. It certainly helps when Microsoft can trot out the President Obama’s CIO to do a demo on the fly of “Dallas” from the White House. He combined it with a demo of Project PinPoint and showed how it would work with Azure. All in 5 minutes, he had a ‘White House Approved’ job search application. I think the interesting question is not whether Microsoft copied SAP (they didn’t, their vision is much more complete – see Alex’s response), but WHAT will SAP do to take advantage of the MSFT cloud platfrom?
The benefit for MS is, that they are about to have a cloud development platform, and MS can be trusted that they build one and not just make some Marketing buzz. And MS is really good in establishing a platform. SAPs “information on demand” is just a store wih some flashy dashboards, the cloud platfrom is missing. I think it cant be compared at the moment, because SAP is missing the cloud platfom.