Google Wave, Google Squared and Thinking Outside the Cube by DAM News Staff

June 5, 2009

So, like everyone else this week I was impressed with theGoogle Wavedemo, and like everyone else in the BI industry had some rudimentary thoughts about how it could be used in a BI context. Certainly a collaboration/discussion/information sharing tool like Wave is very relevant to BI: Microsoft is of course heavily promoting Sharepoint for BI (although I don’t see it used all that much at my customers, and indeed many BI consultants don’t like using it because it adds a lot of extra complexity) and cloud-based BI tools likeGood Dataare already doing something similar. What itcouldbe used for is one thing; whether it willactuallygain any BI functionality is another and that’s why I was interested to see the folks atDSPanelnot only blog about the BI applications of Wave:

http://beyondbi.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/google-wave-the-new-face-of-bi/
…but also announce that theirPerformance Canvasproduct will support it:
http://www.dspanel.com/2009-jun-02/dspanel-performance-canvas-adds-business-intelligence-to-google-wave/
It turns out that theWave API(this articlehas a good discussion of it) makes it very easy for them to do this. A lot of people are talking about Wave as a Sharepoint-killer, and while I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison I think it’s significant that DSPanel, a company that has a strong history in Sharepoint and Microsoft BI, is making this move. It’s not only an intelligent, positive step for them, but I can’t help but wonder whether Microsoft’s encroachment onto DSPanel’s old market with PerformancePoint has helped spur them on. It’s reminiscent of howPanoramastarted looking towards SAP and Google after the Proclarity acquisition put them in direct competition with Microsoft.

Continues @http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4557.entry