Microsoft’s Business Intelligence 2010 Conference today in New Orleans

kummert_webTed Kummert, Senior Vice President for the Business Platform Division, kicked off the start of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence 2010 Conference today in New Orleans. During his keynote address, Ted discussed how Microsoft is listening to customers and working hard to help put better business intelligence in the hands of more decision makers at all levels in an organization. It’s this focus on users and making BI accessible to everyone through familiar, collaborative and managed solutions that differentiates Microsoft BI.

Microsoft hopes to make everyone a BI user and we are targeting the 500 million Office users and the more than 70% of organizations using SharePoint Server today. We endeavored from the earliest part of the product development cycle for SQL Server PowerPivot to bridge the gap between IT and end users by leveraging what is familiar – Excel and SharePoint.

To support end users with additional self-service search capabilities, the new Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector extends the search capabilities of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to understand specific types of Business Intelligence documents – XLSX including PowerPivot models, and RDL from Reporting Services/Report Builder.

Ted was joined on stage with a familiar cast of presenters with him to showcase the newly released Business Intelligence offerings and to hint at future areas of innovation.