deFacto... a new alternative to PerformancePoint Planning?

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Las Vegas for Microsoft's SharePoint Conference.  I have to admit, I came away drinking the Microsoft 'kool aid' after seeing great attention being paid to the new Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities within SharePoint and Excel.  After all, in his keynote speech Ballmer included a demo of PerformancePoint Services within SharePoint and the new PowerPivot capabilities within Excel... over 7,000 attendees were exposed to some very cool BI right there...

BUT, perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the session was discovering deFacto Global, who had a vendor booth and used the SharePoint Conference as an opportunity to "launch" their brand new product, defacto Performance Management.

Here is more information sent to me by the principals at deFacto, including mention of PerformancePoint Planning Migration that is worth checking out if your organization currently uses PerformancePoint Planning and is considering alternatives that align with your current infrastructure...


deFacto Performance Management fulfills the original mission of Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning: a Microsoft-centric budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, reporting and analysis tool that is powerful, scalable, easy to use and implement, and affordable. Built from the ground up by experts behind world-class products from Hyperion Solutions, OutlookSoft, and SAP®, deFacto delivers best-of-the-best performance management capabilities in a single, fully unified product.


deFacto is a highly scalable solution that supports the full range of planning and analysis applications from sophisticated enterprise wide to much more straightforward department level . Built using the vast features of Microsoft’s Excel, and the Relational and Multi-dimensional capabilities of SQL Server, deFacto represents a critical component of any organization’s Microsoft-centric Business Intelligence or Performance Management strategy. It goes far beyond the usual slicing-and-dicing of data to allow instant reporting of user-specific financial and operational data such as finance, marketing, human resources, supply chain, capital planning, profitability, sales, and many others.


deFacto is a completely unified, OLAP-based, analysis and planning product that offers the full range of capabilities users need, including modeling, forecasting, drill-down, drill-through, what-if analysis, reporting, and more. It empowers business users who drive planning processes throughout an organization with the ability to perform real-time analysis by enabling Excel and even SharePoint with data submission capability to its centralized data store. deFacto also complements Microsoft SharePoint Monitoring and Analytics components with powerful capabilities such as cube building, user security, advanced logic, data entry and what-if – all of which can be managed by the business user through the deFacto Modeler.


Migrating to deFacto is Easy….


deFacto offers PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning customers a straightforward and cost-effective way to realize dramatic improvements in the usability, performance, scalability and support of their investment. Planning customers find moving to deFacto is the best and easiest way to transition to a tool that offers critical, must-have functionality and performance, as well as an exciting future. Since deFacto’s core technology is Microsoft-centric, much like PPS Planning, it offers the added benefit of capitalizing on your’ investment in organization-specific assets such as models, dimensions, business rules, data structures, reports, templates, ETL, security, and others.


Whether they are setting-up a new performance management environment from scratch or migrating from another tool, our customers are up and running quickly and efficiently. deFacto provides all of the functionality user’s need while setting a new standard for performance management.


For more information about deFacto Performance Management please visit http://www.defactoglobal.com/.

October 2009 v.30 - Business Intelligence Update

HOT TOPICS
SharePoint Conference – Las Vegas, Oct 19-22
SQL PASS – Seattle, Nov 2-5

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SQL Server 2008 R2 – Managed Self Service Business Intelligence
Blog: Excel 2010, Interacting with Slicers

Feds Refresh Stimulus Tracking Site
http://www.recovery.gov/ – track Stimulus Spending

White House set to unleash 100,000 federal data sources via data.gov
Data.gov Catalogs, FAQ


WEBCASTS
All webcast times are in Eastern Time Zone unless otherwise specified

SaaS and BI
Hosted by Strategy Companion
Oct 16, 2pm
Click here for more info

Save Time and Money with the Business Intelligence Capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics GP
Hosted by Microsoft
Oct 20, 1pm
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How to Create a Clear Vision for your Business Intelligence Needs
Hosted by Neudesic
Oct 20, 2pm
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Jumpstart Sales with Business Intelligence
Hosted by Gig Werks
Oct 28, 1pm
Click here for more info


EVENTS

SoCal BI User Group
Speaker: Daniel Upton
Oct 1, San Diego, CA
Click here for more info

Baton Rouge SQL User Group
Topic: Introduction to MDX
Oct 7, Baton Rouge, LA
Click here for more info

SharePoint Conference 2009
Hosted by Microsoft
Oct 18, Las Vegas, NV
Click here for more info

Boulder SQL Server User Group
Topic: SQL Tuning
Oct 20, Broomfield, CO
Click here for more info

Microsoft PerformancePoint Services and Business Intelligence
Hosted by CSG Professional Services
Oct 27, Portland OR
Click here for more info

TDWI World Conference
Hosted by The Data Warehouse Institute
Nov 1, Orlando, FL
Click here for more info

SQL PASS
Hosted by Microsoft
Nov 2, Seattle, WA
Click here for more info

SharePoint Unleashed
Hosted by Microsoft
Nov 3, Irvine, CA
Click here for more info

Los Angeles SQL Server Professionals Group
Nov 19, Los Angeles, CA
Click here for more info


TRAINING
Web: SQL Server Training Portal
Web: SharePoint Server 2007 Training Portal
Web: Excel 2007 Training Courses
Web: PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics
Dashboard basics I, Dashboard basics II

Microsoft BI Bootcamp
Solid Quality Mentors
Oct 19, Bellevue, WA
Click here for more info

Enterprise ETL with SSIS
Solid Quality Mentors
Oct 19, Minneapolis, MN
Click here for more info

Enterprise ETL with SSIS
Solid Quality Mentors
Nov 9, Beaverton, OR
Click here for more info


RESOURCES
Microsoft BI
CapstoneBI Home page

SQL Server
Business Intelligence: SQL 2005, SQL 2008
Data Mining: SQL 2005, SQL 2008
Whitepaper: New Data Warehouse Scalability Features in SQL Server
Whitepaper: Predicative Analysis with SQL Server 2008
OLAP Heartbeat – monitor activity on Analysis Services
Complex Event Processing

SQL Server 2008: Project "Madison"
Blog: Introduction to SQL Server Project Madison

SSIS: Kimball Method SSIS Slowly Changing Dimension Component

SSAS: SQL Sentry, Performance Optimization Software
SSAS: list of front end applications

SharePoint Server

Business Intelligence: Overview, Using BI Features

PerformancePoint: Technical Library
Download: PerformancePoint SP2 (64-bit or 32-bit)
Whitepaper: Publishing PerformancePoint Server in Extranet Scenarios
Whitepaper: Accessing large scale ROLAP environments with PerformancePoint Server 2007

Office 2010

Project "Gemini"

Related BI Resources
Caveman Forecaster – great resource for data mining/time series forecasting
Federal IT Dashboard


NEWS AND PRESS RELEASES
Getting Started with BI
Smart and cheap: How to improve business intelligence on a tight budget
Want to make BI pervasive? It’s the culture, stupid
IT Jobs May Get Left Behind in Recovery
Tracking Carbon Emissions: The Next Big Reporting Challenge
Profiles in Performance: Q&A with Howard Dresner