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Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of SQL Server(TM) 2000 Reporting Services. Reporting Services provides companies with a powerful new reporting tool that can increase business insight by providing real-time information from any data source to any device. As a result, employees at every level will have better access to information that will increase their ability to make more-informed decisions and provide more business value to their company. With the addition of Reporting Services, SQL Server, a part of the Microsoft(R) Windows Server System(TM), provides the single most comprehensive data management and business intelligence (BI) platform on the market, with integrated analytics that include online analytical processing; data mining; data warehousing; extract, transform and load tools; and reporting functionality. This integrated, end-to-end approach helps companies make better decisions faster while lowering their total cost of ownership. "Reporting Services is an enterprise-level reporting solution that is more affordable than competitive solutions in the marketplace today. It builds on the success of SQL Server 2000 to provide an integrated and scalable solution whether it is used to send interactive reports to five or 50,000 subscribers," said Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Enterprise Servers at Microsoft. "With Reporting Services, our customers benefit from a cost-effective, easy-to-use reporting solution that enables them to better leverage data from their disparate systems for smarter business decisions." Industry Acclaims Microsoft's Comprehensive, Cost-Effective BI Offering SQL Server 2000 offers a broad business intelligence platform that helps enable customers and partners to easily build custom business intelligence applications. This flexibility and interoperability provide users with powerful business intelligence solutions tailored to their specific needs. Customers such as ASB Bank Ltd., Best Buy Company Inc., Coldwater Creek Inc., Cox Communications Inc., IS Partners Co., Long & Foster Companies, Mary Kay Inc., PREMIER Bankcard, RF Micro Devices Inc., Scout-Master and TSYS have already started to implement Reporting Services solutions. "In six short weeks, Reporting Services helped PREMIER Bankcard develop an enterprisewide business intelligence reporting solution that will result in a workload reduction equivalent of at least three full-time employees, giving those employees time to work on other, more-proactive projects," said Dan Zerfas, vice president of application development at PREMIER Bankcard. "Reporting Services is the perfect combination of flexibility, scalability and performance required to support the high-growth rate that we have been enjoying. With just 40 report authors across three business units, we look to deliver 400 BI reports to 500 users at all levels." Reporting Services provides an open and extensible reporting platform industry partners can use to broaden their offerings without investing in building reporting infrastructure. Microsoft is collaborating with companies including ActiveViews Inc., Aspirity LLC, Comprehensive Software Systems, Configuresoft, Fenestrae, Geac Computer Corporation Ltd., Hitachi Consulting Corp., IntelligentApps Ltd., Intellinet Technologies, OutlookSoft Corp., MaxQ Technologies Inc., MIS AG, Professional Advantage, ProClarity Corp., Solutions Consulting Group, Silvon Software Inc., SPSS Inc., Trax Retail Solutions Inc. and Unisys. Industry analysts have also expressed high expectations for the value Reporting Services will bring to customers and partners. According to Giga Information Group analysts Philip Russom and Keith Gile, Reporting Services has the potential to reshape the niche market for reporting, just as SQL Server's Analysis Services has for online analytic processing (OLAP) and Data Transformation Services (DTS) has for extraction, transformation and load (ETL). Educational efforts by Microsoft will raise the profile of reporting technologies and the realization of their usefulness, while bringing usability and cost within the technical and budgetary grasp of far more companies. A valid SQL Server 2000 license is required for each server on which Reporting Services is deployed. It is available in nine languages including traditional and simplified Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Customers "At ASB Bank, we strive to be one step ahead, leading the market in innovation and customer service. Reporting Services delivers. It increases productivity and reduces our time to market. It allows information delivery to meet the business needs as the business grows and changes. As part of our proof of concept, we were able to deliver Web-based reporting in five days that in the past had taken five weeks to develop. In terms of cost-effectiveness and integration with the Microsoft products, it was the obvious choice." --Chris Mitchell Manager Data Warehouse Group Technology Solutions ASB Bank Ltd. "We've done an initial evaluation and think Reporting Services has the potential to solve many of our information delivery challenges, with great usability and a manageable cost. We will use Reporting Services as the target platform for a limited number of BI projects in 2004, and there is potential for a much broader rollout if the initial experience goes as expected." --Harold Knutson Vice President Corporate Systems and Data Solutions Best Buy Co. Inc. "Our business intelligence team works in a fast-paced environment where timely information is key to the strategic decision-making process. Reporting Services quickly allows us to supply easy-to-use, interactive reports in a 'self-service' format, which has significantly reduced the workload of our BI team while streamlining access to information. In addition, Reporting Services integrates well with our SQL Server data warehouse environment and makes it easy for our business intelligence analysts to configure, while offering similar ease of use to all our customers who need to create and print custom reports. My vision is that we will use the self-service access component of Reporting Services to handle up to 80 percent of customer questions. This will free up my BI team to concentrate on the strategic analysis necessary to help Coldwater Creek continue building a premier, national, women's apparel brand." -- Dan Moen Vice President Business Intelligence and Marketing Coldwater Creek Inc. "A major benefit of Reporting Services is that I can have business analysts create the reports end users need, instead of queuing them up to be done by a software developer. This new capability will free an estimated 800 developer-hours per year, which will save us a lot of money because we won't need to outsource nearly as much development work as we have in the past." --Tim Winebarger Manager NOC Tools Group Cox Communications Inc. "Reporting Services enables us to provide our customers with daily, weekly and monthly customer service information. It has taken away the burden of scheduling, generating and delivering the huge number of reports we deliver to our clients. Our key account managers have been freed up to focus on taking action and unlocking value in the information we generate, rather than being burdened by the manual process of generating and distributing information. In addition, we view Reporting Services as a tool that can be used by our global distribution businesses. Relative to other systems we have tried, it seems more affordable, provides flexibility and does not require a particularly specialized skill set to set up." --Craig Aiken Director Customer Feedback Systems IS Partners Co. "Our goal was to build a single, unified reporting platform that would allow us to quickly release a new set of performance measurement reports and subsequently port our existing catalog of more than 250 reports. Reporting Services has proven to be a perfect solution: Our software developers were impressed by the first-class report designer, tight integration with Visual Studio(R) .NET, short learning curve and overall extensibility of the framework. Meanwhile, our business sponsors appreciated the compressed time to market and the fact that they didn't have to make another million-dollar software investment." --Lance Morimoto Senior Manager Long & Foster Companies "SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services provides an integrated environment for report development, management and delivery. Within three weeks of getting our hands on Reporting Services, we knew it was the right way to go. Users will benefit from a single portal through which they can subscribe to and view reports. Users also will enjoy a more consistent report look and feel." --Doug Voss Director Supply Chain Information Services and Technologies Mary Kay Inc. "In six short weeks, Reporting Services helped PREMIER Bankcard develop an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence reporting solution which will result in a workload reduction equivalent of at least three full-time employees, giving those employees time to work on other more proactive projects. Reporting Services is the perfect combination of flexibility, scalability and performance required to support the high-growth rate that we have been enjoying. With just 40 report authors across three business units, we look to deliver 400 BI reports to 500 users at all levels." --Dan Zerfas Vice President Application Development PREMIER Bankcard "We are pleased with the results we've achieved using SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. This new reporting solution is a cost-effective system that provides RFMD the simplicity and flexibility we need to create essential business reports. Specifically, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services has provided RFMD with an approximate fourfold increase in report development productivity, improved access to information for end users, and low total cost of ownership." --Forrest Moore Chief Information Officer Corporate Vice President of Information Technology RF Micro Devices (RFMD) "SQL Server Reporting Services is stable, easy to program and implement -- it has changed the way we do reporting. Now we're using reports in place of complicated Web pages and convoluted, expensive reporting products. Reporting Services has helped us meet our challenges quickly and move on." --Paul Turley Chief Architect Scout-Master.com "Without SQL Server Reporting Services, we would not have been able to consolidate multiple disparate data sources into concise reporting output (e-mail, Web content and, for some customers, old-fashioned paper) in a rapid fashion. In the financial area we face the prospect of having to access and report on data housed on multiple systems of record, to include IMS, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and even legacy-based systems employing flat file database structures. SQL Server Reporting Services enabled us to create a new dimension for our core application product TSYS ProphIT, and do this in the rapid fashion based on superb extensibility and integration with Visual Studio .NET. The power of the product for us was the capability to extend current .NET Web services to include code and offerings that extended reporting without massive changes to our core Web services." --Tim Kelly Director ProphIT Team TSYS Partners "ActiveViews is leveraging the flexibility and delivery power of Reporting Services to empower business users to interactively and iteratively build their own reports. It's allowing us to offer the market an inexpensive alternative to costly legacy reporting systems for both corporate IT and ISVs and really complete the job of delivering meaningful data access to many, many more business users." --Rob Hicks President ActiveViews Inc. "SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is positioned to provide organizations with a comprehensive and extensible report development and distribution platform. We are excited to offer customers the training and consulting necessary to quickly realize the benefits of Reporting Services." --Elizabeth Vitt Consulting Manager Aspirity LLC "Reporting Services has enabled Configuresoft to easily deliver new dashboard reporting capabilities that simplify IT security and operations management as well as corporate compliance with government legislation like HIPAA and GLBA. In addition, Reporting Services eliminates the need for our customers to purchase a third-party reporting engine for Enterprise Configuration Manager, and reduces development costs for us by providing reporting capabilities that seamlessly integrate with our tool." --Randy Streu Vice President Product Management Configuresoft Inc. "Through Microsoft's Joint Developer Program (JDP), Microsoft and Comprehensive Software Systems (CSS) have truly had the opportunity to build the most advanced reporting technology for the financial services industry. CSS's expansive knowledge of the industry's needs, as well as our deep understanding of the limitations of existing 'industry standard' technology, has enabled Microsoft to raise the bar considerably for financial services reporting technology with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services." --Michael T. Landy Co-founder and CTO CSS "We are pleased to announce our integration with Reporting Services, expanding Fenestrae messaging and mobility solutions to include business intelligence requirements. We continue to build on the tightest partnership with Microsoft, delivering our customers and partners true integration with Reporting Services from the launch." --Nick Horslam Vice President Strategic Alliances Fenestrae "We look forward to introducing our customers to Reporting Services. Since reporting and analysis is a corporate necessity, it is critical that we have a solution our customers can depend on. With so many BI tools out there, having Reporting Services at hand will save our hundreds of SQL Server customers the time and hassle of vendor evaluation. Our services consultants are already taking advantage of Analysis Services and Data Transformation Services. Reporting Services will be another great tool to have in their 'bag.'" --Tim Wright Chief Technology Officer Geac Computer Corporation Ltd. "As a provider of consulting services to enterprise organizations, Hitachi Consulting provides innovative solutions to meet our customers' needs. We evaluate new technologies almost every day for our clients to ensure that we are delivering leading-edge solutions with long-term viability. After extensive research on the various BI and reporting platforms, we chose Reporting Services because it enables our consultants to deliver an integrated and extensible solution without significant software and development costs." --Brian Biglin Senior Manager Hitachi Consulting "Large corporations will be able to leverage the existing skills base and business knowledge they currently have in Excel to develop corporate performance management applications based on Reporting Services and Analysis Services in a fraction of the time, complexity and cost of any existing alternative solution." --Paul Martin CEO IntelligentApps Ltd. "Intellinet is very excited about the launch of Reporting Services and the great business value it creates for our clients. Reporting Services enhances the value of the BI solutions that we implement for our clients and allows them to make better, faster business decisions. Reporting Services is resulting in improved troubleshooting capabilities, better maintenance, more efficient use of resources and improved report processing." --Dave Fackler Managing Partner Development Practice Intellinet Corp. "Coupled with the dynamic parameter feature of eProphet, the Reporting Services linked report capabilities have enabled us to provide structured analysis. Users of eProphet can now create relationships between multiple reports and have these reports filtered by a set of shared parameters. This unique feature allows business analysts to provide controlled data exploration capabilities to the decision-makers, thus allowing them to make quick, sound business decisions." --Anthony Peccerillo Vice President Development MaxQ Technologies Inc. "Our integration with Reporting Services enables us to provide an even more robust solution to our customers. Reporting Services' scalable infrastructure brings benefits such as extended report delivery and management functionality, enhancing our MIS DecisionWare product suite." --Stefan Sexl General Manager MIS AG GmbH "OutlookSoft is pleased to have participated as a beta partner during Microsoft's development of Reporting Services. The integration of Reporting Services with OutlookSoft Everest provides exciting new functionality and benefit to all our Business Performance Management clients." --Perlie Voshell Vice President Technology OutlookSoft Corp. "ProClarity welcomes the introduction of Reporting Services to the BI market, as the combined offering with ProClarity will enable customers to cost-effectively deliver a complete solution that includes both relational and best-in-class OLAP functionality on the Microsoft platform. With the integration of Reporting Services and the ProClarity Analytics Platform, Microsoft and ProClarity will deliver custom analytic applications and BI capabilities beyond those previously available at a value point that cannot be achieved elsewhere." --Clay Young Senior Vice President Strategic Marketing ProClarity Corp. "Reporting Services will make a huge impact on the middle market as in recent years we have seen demand for reporting solutions grow while cost of other reporting products increased. By coupling Reporting Services with Microsoft's other Business Intelligence products, we will be able to offer our midmarket customers powerful information systems that were traditionally reserved for much larger corporations, due to the large investment that was required. Now our clients will be able to use Microsoft-based information systems to drive their business performance." --Mark Miller Microsoft Business Manager Professional Advantage "SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is helping us get bigger projects that we can deliver within shorter time frames. By integrating Reporting Services with Data Transformation Services and Analysis Services we are deploying custom BI products with Enterprise Reporting, Cube Analysis and Ad-Hoc Querying for a fraction of the traditional cost. Functionality for Report Delivery and Alerting also costs less with Business Intelligence Portal (BIP) for SharePoint. We have seen an average of 80 percent reductions in time to market delivery of our BI solutions." --Bill Edmett Jr. Partner Practice Management SCG Inc. "The integration of Reporting Services with our Stratum suite of enterprise performance management applications will allow our fast-moving consumer-goods customers to easily deliver performance-related reports to remote and extended users any time or anywhere as they manufacture and distribute their products to market. This integration evolved in direct response to today's growing velocity of business, which has forced greater requirements on manufacturers, distributors and retailers to share business performance data not only with more users throughout their enterprises, but with partners across their trading networks as well. Our Reporting Services integration will transform the process of creating and distributing reports from being IT-driven to one that's driven by end users. Plus, our customers will be able to leverage the benefits of Reporting Services right out of the box since it's integrated with an application they already know." --Michael J. Hennel President and CEO Silvon Software Inc. "With the launch of Reporting Services, Microsoft is further strengthening its position in the business intelligence marketplace. Not only are we excited about OLAP Hub's support of Reporting Services, but we also expect Reporting Services to provide additional value to our suite of predictive analytics technology. Ultimately, we envision a joint solution that combines SPSS predictive analytics with Microsoft's Analysis Services." --Jon Otterstatter Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer SPSS Inc. "Trax, like Microsoft, is focused on helping retailers build smarter and more profitable enterprises. With SmartStore(R) supporting Reporting Services, together we are empowering retail enterprises with a complete business solution for simplifying internal processes, managing consistent flow of information, and storing, analyzing and extracting valuable data. The result is expert shrink reduction and store operations effectiveness that build and maintain greater chainwide profitability." --Ron Southard Vice President Sales and Marketing Trax Retail Solutions "Unisys delivers Business Intelligence Solution Blueprints, allowing organizations to quickly and easily deploy an enterprise-level solution based upon the Microsoft Reporting Services platform. This approach allows our customers to implement a fully qualified solution that allows them to reduce risk, limit their total cost of ownership (TCO) and maximize the revenue that they will realize from these strategic initiatives. Unisys is committed to Microsoft and its suite of BI tools and has created a Reporting Services Solution Blueprint to allow customers to easily and quickly implement a comprehensive Microsoft BI infrastructure for their enterprise." --Don Montgomery Director Business Intelligence Unisys Corp.