PPS Planning is being discontinued - What could have went wrong?

Although little late, I thought of putting my views on the overall episode of PPS Planning being discontinued. Whatever happened, doesn't seem right, however the question is why it happened and the reason behind it. For us we don't have any other option than putting our views unless we get some specifics (which I don't think will happen) from peoples from Microsoft.

As per the information available the development of PPS started during 2003 timeframe under the code name of Biz# and it was finally released during end of 2007. So here we are talking about development time frame of around 4-5 yrs which is a considerable effort.

Now keeping in view the trend of delivering the Software as a Service (SaaS), Planning Module of PerformancePoint Server's underlying architecture was not targeted for SaaS (you might have already heard of 'Oracle Launches Oracle Hyperion On Demand'). However the the complete Monitoring & Analytics was delivered through Sharepoint Server which I guess MS has already spent some effort to bring into SaaS structure (the base of my assumption is the recently announced 'Microsoft Sharepoint Online'). So integrating the Monitoring & Analytics part to Sharepoint as 'PerformancePoint Services' looks to be safe step towards ensuring the availability of the application in SaaS model.

 

I have few more content that needs to be added to this post, I will do that as soon as I get some time.

 

These are my personal thoughts and I would welcome the comments correcting me if my understanding is not correct in this regard.

 

Thanks.

Business Intelligence VPC Release 7.1 Download

Yesterday I got the information that 'Business Intelligence VPC Release 7.1' is available for download. The links can be found from the blog entry http://performancepointblog.com/2008/12/all-up-bi-vpc-71-available-for-public-download/ in PerformancePoint Blog.

 

There are many demos included in this VPC. You can get the list in below screenshot.

The VHD image comes with below listed Products installed:

One more thing that needs to be informed about is that this VHD is time sensitive and will expire on 15th Apr 2010. Plenty of time to play with the software but not to keep any important data.

The only drawback is the amount of RAM that will need to be allocated to this VPC in order to work properly. I guess 2GB of RAM is the minimum that will be required for this VPC. Or my suggetion would be to create 2-3 copies of this VHD and categories the demos across these VHD's and distribute the load and remove the duplicate databases / applications across these copies.

Also I doubt whether this image has PPS SP2 installed, so that is one more step that we will need to do once it has been downloaded. Also it will be good to have a look at 'Speeding up the All-up BI VPC' blog posted at http://performancepointing.blogspot.com/2008/07/speeding-up-all-up-bi-vpc.html.