The New Adventures Of Old Business Intelligence

To maintain that momentum, Microsoft will take aim at the performance-management sector of the BI arena this fall when it debuts a suite of tools built around its PerformancePoint Server. Now in beta, the suite will include business scorecard and dashboard development software, financial consolidation tools, and analysis software Microsoft acquired when it bought ProClarity last year.

Microsoft sees opportunities for its channel partners to implement data warehouse, performance management, and reporting and analysis systems based on Microsoft products, says Chris Caren, who as general manager of Office business applications oversees Microsoft's BI efforts. With PerformancePoint on the horizon, Microsoft is recruiting new channel partners with expertise in performance management, and offering partners free educational workshops.

Not that the market leaders are sitting still. Business Objects, which already generates about half of its sales through its 2,300 channel partners, has been courting solution providers as part of its own aggressive push into the midmarket. As part of that effort, Business Objects offers Crystal Decisions, Standard Edition, an integrated package of query, reporting, analysis and dashboard tools for the midmarket that VARs build systems around and for which they provide support and educational services. Other editions of the package with data-integration and performance-management capabilities are due later this year. Business Objects is also working with VARs to develop reports and data connectors around Crystal Decisions for specific business processes and vertical industries.

Given the price sensitivity of smaller businesses, the Crystal Decisions line opens doors to new midmarket customers by allowing Preferred Strategies to offer contract bids as low as $60,000. "It's very, very competitive," Vander Woude says, contrasting that against the six-figure bids the company makes with Business Objects' enterprise-class products.

Business Objects also recently started a program for its North American channel partners under which resellers can earn "considerably more" by driving the entire sales cycle, from initial sales lead to proof-of-concept to implementation, without assistance from the vendor's direct sales staff, says Tamra Muir, Business Objects' vice president of worldwide VAR and distribution partners. Last month, IBM expanded its BI efforts with new "Balanced Warehouse" systems that preconfigure server and storage hardware with IBM's DB2 Data Warehouse and Business Objects' Crystal Reports Server.

SAS Institute, which began recruiting for its new channel partner program last summer, now has some 60 partners--including about 35 VARs that also work with competitors--who currently have between $15 million and $20 million in deals in the sales pipeline, says Jack Duncan, director of channel sales. SAS hopes to have a stable of 150 to 200 partners by the end of this year.