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MICROSOFT SQL SERVER ACCELERATOR FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Microsoft Corp announced the availability of the Microsoft SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence (Accelerator for BI). The Accelerator for BI is a rapid application development tool to automate the process of building the infrastructure of an analytical application. The tool was created so partners can quickly and more easily build customized BI solutions to meet customers' specific needs. The Accelerator for BI lowers the barrier to entry for developing analytical applications, making business intelligence more accessible to customers.

The Accelerator for BI encapsulates industry best practices and automates the building process to create the back end for a customized BI solution, significantly decreasing the amount of time needed for design and development. Automating these procedures enables partners and customers to spend less time coding and architecting the solution so they can instead focus on the unique end-user business requirements. The resulting applications have better business focus and enable the customer to bring the solution to market faster, resulting in a higher return on investment.

"Historically, data warehouse projects have been difficult to develop and can take several months to complete due largely to the painstaking process to set up the back-end portion of the analytical application," said Bill Baker, general manager for SQL Server at Microsoft. "The SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence structures the development process, so partners can develop analytical applications in a matter of days vs. months."

Developing the Business Intelligence Ecosystem

The Accelerator for BI includes an ecosystem based on SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services that provides support, tools and best practices for building business intelligence applications. It enables customers to focus on their business needs and partners to focus on their core competencies in developing and integrating custom analytic solutions. The custom analytics builder lets partners add their own intellectual property and services to provide added-value solutions to the customers.

"The Microsoft SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence has truly revolutionized how we build the back end," said Dan Bulos, president of Symmetry Corp., which helped Microsoft develop the SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence. "By automating the best practices of BI design and development, the Accelerator for BI makes it possible to develop applications in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. We are glad to have been a part of the development process."

"The SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence represents a significant step in Microsoft's goal of advancing SQL Server and Analysis Services as a widely deployed analytical platform," said Dr. Henry Morris, vice president for Applications and Information Access software research at IDC. "By aiding in the definition of back-end data structures, it should make the creation of analytic applications on Analysis Services within the reach of more developers than was possible before."

The Accelerator for BI offers partners and customers the following key benefits:

• Customized solutions. The Accelerator for BI enables partners to deliver solutions that are based on client needs; these customized analytic applications give customers better access to and understanding of the data that is important to them.
• Faster time to market. The Accelerator for BI automates back-end processes, enabling developers to quickly create and deploy customized analytical solutions in a fraction of the time.
• Increased return on investment. The Accelerator for BI increases return on investment by shortening the development cycle, reproducing other successful models and implementations, prototyping and deploying rapidly, and enforcing best practices.
• Flexible solution. The Accelerator for BI allows easy integration with existing information systems. The framework includes a flexible development environment called the Analytics Builder Worksheet that is adaptable for rapid iterative development and is reusable for consistency in future deployments. This flexibility allows businesses to adapt to shifting conditions over time.
• Extensible framework and ecosystem. The Accelerator for BI is part of a total ecosystem to help the industry build better business intelligence solutions. The framework lets partners add their own expertise, while the ecosystem includes prescriptive architecture guidance, best practices, partner solutions, and a support network that will help increase the penetration of business intelligence.
• Increased access to SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The Accelerator for BI is the fastest path to delivering analytical solutions based on SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The simplified process helps partners build customized solutions that take advantage of enterprise-class scalability and the industry-leading Data Transformation Services, OLAP and data mining features of the SQL Server platform. By helping partners develop and deploy business intelligence applications more quickly and easily, Microsoft is delivering on its vision to make business intelligence more pervasive and more accessible to everyone.

The SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence is available for download at no additional cost to licensed SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition users. More information can be found at www.microsoft.com/solutions/bi.

About SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is the complete database and analysis offering for rapidly delivering the next generation of scalable e-commerce, line-of-business and data warehousing solutions. SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services provides the business intelligence enterprises need to make smarter decisions. Over time, decisions made using this kind of intelligence can have a dramatic bottom-line effect on the business. More information on Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence can be found at www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/bi.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft is a worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device.