I’m a little bit disappointed of not getting information about PerformancePoint v2 at the Microsoft BI Conference 2008. Why to announce Gemini that will be shipped in 2010, and not mention a single word about PerformancePoint v2, which whould be shipped probably earlier than that date?

In reality, the reason is clear to me. Gemini has been announced now to make a position against competitive product that are already on the market. Of course, Gemini will be much more integrated with the overall platform, but it will not available to customer in production for at least 18 months, I think. Thus, this announcement is a tactical move for Microsoft.

However, what we can do today? We need to deliver “traditional” BI Solution and the new release of PerformancePoint would be important in all these scenarios where the actual version is not mature enough to meet existing requirements. The official word should be “PerformancePoint will be part of the Office 14 wave, and it has still to be announced”. However, I would have expected a much more detailed explanation of products coming in the near future.

Now, let’s make a summary of the Microsoft BI Conference 2008. Most of attendees I talked with (including me) think that three keynotes with this kind of content for three days of conference were not a good idea. Only the keynote of the first day makes sense. The other were unproductive and/or not so important at all. The session about Gemini held yesterday by Amir Netz was way way way more visionary of a lot of buzzwords we heard on following keynotes. Microsoft did a very good job of improving technical level of sessions, but this good job has not be done for keynotes. Moreover, all these keynotes removed time for breakout sessions, allowing an attendee to see only 9 breakout session in three days. You can see the same number of breakout sessions in two days of a “typical” Microsoft technical conference. Need several improvements here, but the technical content was really improved over the previous edition.

A good news is that the third Microsoft BI Conference is already scheduled: October 6-8, 2009, in Seattle. Save the date, it should be a conference delivering real bits to attendees…