An alternate casting for “Silicon Valley”..
Last week, at the SQL PASS summit, Microsoft publicly unveiled their Business Intelligence Reporting Roadmap to widespread critical acclaim. The vision is, in my opinion comprehensive, and complete. It’s probably the most comprehensive articulation of vision that we’ve seen in the Microsoft BI world in 10 years. It spells out the investments being made in Reporting Services, the integration of Datazen, and the importance of Power BI in the overall structure. There is one BI technology that is rather conspicuous by its absence
PerformancePoint
PerformancePoint isn’t mentioned in the roadmap at all. As far as I know, it wasn’t mentioned during the PASS summit either. I haven’t heard it mentioned by anyone at Microsoft since the Ignite conference last May, when Bill Baer confirmed that it would be a part of SharePoint Server 2016. Of course, as I mentioned in my post at the time, inclusion doesn’t mean that the product has a future. Although it will be included, its for backward compatibility reasons – there are absolutely no new investments in the product, it’s exactly the same as it was in SharePoint 2013.
This has happened to multiple products at Microsoft, Silverlight and InfoPath are the most recent examples. Once a product is ignored, the next step is often not an announcement of its demise, its just allowed to slowly fade away into obscurity. They go out with a whimper, not a bang. In my opinion, this is exactly what has been happening with PerformancePoint, but really, you don’t need to take my word for it. The section header from the roadmap blog post says it all.
“Reporting Services is our on-premises solution for BI report delivery”
Reporting Services… not PerformancePoint. I do realize that there is still one use case that can only be served by PerformancePoint, and that is Scorecards. Scorecards are rolled up KPIs, and no other product in the BI stack does this out of the box. However, with the release speed of the Power BI team, I can only conclude that scorecards will only be a matter of time.
At this point, I would strongly dissuade anyone from using PerformancePoint for any new projects. If you have an existing investment in PerformancePoint, you might want to start thinking about alternate methods of delivering that capability.