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Microsoft to Acquire ProClarity

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the changing-hands dept.

Gosalia writes "In order to increase its presence in the business intelligence market, Microsoft announced its plan to acquire business analytics software developer ProClarity. 'This acquisition advances our (business intelligence) strategy and our ability to deliver performance management applications to customers,' Jeff Raikes, Microsoft business division president, said in a statement."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Good acquisition by TechnoGuyRob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft has been experiencing a lot of disorganization recently. With the qualification of some machines as un-Vista capable, it's delay of Vista until January 2007, popular technology experts' Opinions that "America isn't ready for Microsoft's Vista", and all kinds of project delays (Media Center, XBox, etc.) they are in need of some clear visual indication as to the direction they must take. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

    I find this statement from an InformationWeek article to clear up what ProClarity exactly does: "ProClarity makes analysis and visualization software." Much of this software is in very popular demand now; a friend of mine just started a job at a company called SSS, which makes visualization software for modeling all kinds of information and displaying it in a manner that is very informative and interactive. Google released something similar, Google Analytics, for websites, and it has been a huge success (heck, Slashdot uses it).

    Overall, I think this is a very smart move on Microsoft's part. Software for organizing information can be very useful. It's also nice to see some Microsoft articles on Slashdot for a change (even though I'm not a big fan of Microsoft), rather than the usual Googlomination.

    1. Re:Good acquisition by Ucklak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'll give you Excel but keep in mind that Excel was one of Microsoft's first applications written well before the corruption.

      MSSQL was acquired throuth a partnership with Sybase and Ashton-Tate and the codebase was written by Sybase and Ashton-Tate, not Microsoft.

      --
      if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
  2. Now we can blame another internal division... by TheUncleD · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Usually a buyout like this would send people the message to immediately raise their expectations about the future performance of the business products. ProClarity has worked with Microsoft as a partner up until now to help them optimize SQL Server. Now we have to wonder how integral the ProClarity division will become and how likely they'll be the new target of internal blame when the intelligence just doesn't stack up. ProClarity claims that their business intelligence software and solutions are used for decision support, data mining, balanced scorecards, and reporting from multiple data sources. It would be interesting to know just what scoring devices they'll be using for Microsoft's up and coming products. Gold Star: It didn't crash until I opened a second copy Silver: It was backwards compatable almost 30% of files from the previous version. Bronze Star: Autosave worked great right after autodelete worked great! Participants Award: Good thing they were only beta-testers...