A New BackOffice Business Analytics Product

I recently learned about an interesting new beta project at Microsoft code named Maestro.  Maestro provides realtime monitoring of back-office system metrics, such as SAP, into a historical data warehouse.  In a sense, you'll get a strong dashboard and BI feature for your SAP system.

Maestro will leverage SQL Server (2000 or 2005) along with both Reporting Services and Notification Services.  SharePoint is required and additional features become available if the user has SharePoint Portal Server.  The new product will be called "Office System Server".

If you're a big user of Cognos, Business Objects, or Hyperion, you might want to consider this new product.  Maestor is currently in an early TAP-style beta program and will be in full beta at the end of summer.  Pricing hasn't been set yet.  Since final shipment is set for Q4 of this year, I'm sure pricing will be in place soon.

"This is part of Microsoft's answer to [BusinessObjects] XI and NetWeaver integration," said one partner source.

For more details, read at:

http://www.sqljunkies.com/Article/3836846B-89D6-41B1-8036-A0337137BEDB.scuk

Cheers,

-Kevin