Call for long term strategy in Microsoft BI Client

I know, the answer is: SharePoint. But, despite SharePoint 2010 is much easier to install (well, I’m not talking about the Beta release here).

I recently blogged about the lack of a killer application for the client side. I’ve got many many interesting comments. I recently talked about Excel Services and Chris wrote about SSRS overlapping with other reporting/dashboarding tools in his blog.

Chris raised a question about SoftArtisan acquisition, and we are often wondering about ProClarity acquisition and Dundas licensing (Dundas had a Pivot Table for the web that today is a big lack in Reporting Services and is available only through Excel Services in SharePoint).

Anyway, the point is: what is the long term strategy for BI Client in Microsoft? This is an important question for all those companies that don’t have (and/or don’t plane to use) SharePoint. Or that are going to use SharePoint in a hosted environment for their collaboration purposes (Microsoft sells this service!) but still have data on their servers. And they want to analyze (and internally publish) these data. Today, I really don’t have an answer and this is not a good situation for a consultant like me.