Microsoft Cancels 2009 BI Conference, Schedules It For Every Two Years

Microsoft also disclosed that from now on, the BI Conference will be a biennial event, with the next conference scheduled for October 2010 in Seattle and subsequent conferences held every other year.

"We heard from our customers and partners that due to global economic constraints to travel budgets worldwide, we should make the BI Conference a biennial event," the blog said.

The blog goes on to say that Microsoft business intelligence software will be discussed at next month's TechEd conference in Los Angeles and the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans in July. It also will be a "core component" of both the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in October and the SQL Server Pass database user conference in Seattle in November.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said it would discontinue its PerformancePoint business intelligence and performance management software and build the product's dashboard, scorecard and data analysis capabilities into the SharePoint collaboration platform. Microsoft is scheduled to release a third and final service pack for PerformancePoint around midyear.

Microsoft has portrayed the move to build business intelligence capabilities into SharePoint as a move to make BI more accessible to a wider range of users. But analysts say PerformancePoint failed to catch on with customers because it was too complex to use and was released before it was fully functional. Some are likely to see the cancellation of this year's BI Conference as further evidence that Microsoft is refocusing its efforts on its core platform software.