Gartner recently issued its annual Magic Quadrant Business Intelligence Platforms and in it, thanks in part to customer feedback, elevated Microsoft's position within the Leader's quadrant. For more information on Gartner's 2011 Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant, please visit Microsoft's new BI blog here and follow Microsoft BI on twitter @MicrosoftBI.

As a reminder, here is a list of some of our most recent product developments and important BI‐related initiatives that are helping customers solve business problems:

  • Two weeks ago we announced the release of the HP Business Decisions Appliance developed as a software/hardware solution to enable easy access to self-service business intelligence technology.
  • Then in November, we announced the general availability of the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, which offers customers high scalability to hundreds of terabytes, scalable performance and a complete data warehouse platform thanks to integration with Microsoft Business Intelligence tools like PowerPivot, Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Integration Services.
  • In April, we released to manufacturer new premium editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 - an effort to showcase our continued commitment to mission critical workloads with the availability of a managed self‐service BI tool for reporting and analysis. Some of specific features and benefits include:
    • PowerPivot, a managed self‐service analysis solution that empowers people to access, analyze and share data across the enterprise in an IT managed environment using Excel 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.
    • Master Data Services (MDS), an "any domain" hub that helps organizations standardize and streamline business data used enterprise‐wide.
    • Application and Multi‐Server Management, SMP scale up with support for up to 256 logical processors, provides centralized visibility and control to help IT professionals and developers more effectively deploy and manage information and applications.
    • Report Builder 3.0, with support for geospatial visualization, enables end users to rapidly build their own reports through "Grab and Go" reporting.
    • StreamInsight, a low latency complex even processing platform gives customers faster time to solution and equal or better performance and manageability than other alternatives.