Small introduction to BI
Facts never lie. They provide a measure of your company’s past and current performance. If blended with planning and trending data, it can also give an insight to the future performance.
The central purpose of Business Intelligence is to drive improved business performance. BI does this by providing decision makers with monitoring and analysis of existing data, thus providing them with a better basis for their strategies and plans.
Today, more than ever, every company needs to dig deeper and take informed decisions; Decisions – based on hard numbers and scientific analysis.

Why SMBs should go for BI?
SMBs always perceived BI as behemoth systems involving huge amounts money, time and labor. Trying to assemble a working system from shrink-wrapped software was often daunting. Or pulling together products from multiple vendors could prove a challenge; pieces and parts may have worked individually, but integrating them together could prove a monumental task. And fully custom-built solutions can represent an astronomical expense, putting them out of range for many small- and mid-sized companies.
Not anymore. While the Microsoft BI platform is not magic—some work is required to achieve results—Microsoft’s SQL Server platform and integrated BI tools overcome these past challenges.
The delivery of BI information to decision makers in a company can be accomplished in a number of ways. This is where Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services are an excellent vehicle for the basic display and dissemination of BI information. But other familiar Microsoft products — particularly SharePoint and Office tools like Excel and Access — are ideally suited for this task as well.

How can Microsoft BI stack help SMB?
One Stop shopping – the Microsoft BI stack.

An option small and mid-sized businesses should examine is Microsoft’s BI platform. If your company runs Microsoft SQL Server, you already own all the software and licenses you need to build and run a powerful, robust and effective Business Intelligence solution. In the past, diving into BI tools and applications could be a bewildering and frustrating experience.
Microsoft’s flagship database product, SQL Server, is fully equipped with state-of-the-art BI components. Starting with SQL Server 2000, and then with marked improvements in SQL Server 2005 and now SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has built a full complement of data warehousing, ETL, analytics and reporting tools into the platform. Any company that runs the Standard or Enterprise editions of Microsoft SQL Server already has the basic components of a BI system.

Microsoft BI stack – ancillary benefits
Microsoft has invested significantly in their products; these tools are professional-class; some of the components can already be considered best-of-breed, and each component of the toolset compares favorably with comparable competitive software.
To raise the bar further, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, a product that provides comprehensive Business Process Management (BPM) functionality via the framework of Microsoft Office and publish reports over the Intranet or Internet. SharePoint Server natively takes full advantage of a SQL Server BI environment. With user tools like scorecards, dashboards, and strategy maps, it’s easy to deliver vital information to your company’s decision makers when they need it, anytime.

Microsoft BI Stack Implementation


Microsoft’s Business Intelligence platform and toolset represent a complete end-to-end solution, with low total cost of ownership. Because it is so self-contained, yet with an architecture open enough to integrate with tools from virtually any other vendor, it can serve as either the backbone of a BI architecture or just a component of a large and heterogeneous BI system. SQL Server scales very well, and offers excellent performance even at high data volumes.