ACADEMIA

DALLAS -- Today at Microsoft Tech*Ed 2003, Microsoft Corp. announced it will extend its business intelligence platform by shipping Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 2000 Reporting Services by the end of the year. A public beta version will be available this fall. Reporting Services provides companies and information workers with a powerful tool that can increase business insight by providing the real-time information needed from any data source to any device. The result is every employee at every level will have better access to information that will increase their decision-making capabilities and provide more business value to the company. "SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services on the Microsoft platform delivers the key capabilities for companies and information workers to make critical, timely and accurate decisions in today's 'real-time' business environment," said Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president for SQL Server at Microsoft. "Our customers demand these capabilities from our platform and view information technology (IT) as a strategic asset in their organization. We share this view, and their passion, and are committed to delivering a highly comprehensive, integrated and interoperable platform to meet their needs and realize new-business potential." Integrated Business Intelligence Provides More Value to Industry Partners and Developers SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services provides a broad business intelligence platform that can enable developers to easily build custom applications. This flexibility and interoperability provide customers with powerful business intelligence solutions tailored to their specific and strategic IT needs. "With the addition of Reporting Services, Microsoft provides a highly comprehensive analysis and reporting solution on the market," said Keith Landers, chief technology officer of Extreme Logic Inc. "For our customers, the significance is that they can now get a reporting technology from Microsoft that is familiar, integrated and cost-effective. By deploying Reporting Services, customers will get increased insight into their business, which will ultimately improve decision-making, thereby increasing efficiency and productivity." In addition, Reporting Services supports a wide range of data sources including OLE DB and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) as well as multiple output formats including Web browsers and Microsoft Office System applications. Using Microsoft Visual Studio(R) .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework, developers can extend the capabilities of the platform, enabling it to connect to custom data sources, produce additional output formats and deliver to more devices. With the addition of Reporting Services, SQL Server provides the single most comprehensive data management and BI platform on the market, with integrated analytics including online analytical processing OLAP, data mining, data warehousing, extract, transform, load (ETL) tools, and data warehousing and reporting functionality. This helps companies realize the value of better decision-making while lowering total cost of ownership.