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Extraction, Transformation & Loading : often expensive ! ETL or the art of extracting, transforming and loading data is a key process in developing and maintaining a data warehouse, the foundation for sound Performance Management. It can however be an expensive process: not only because it requires a lot of resources and state of the art hardware, but also because the well known ETL-tools from IBM, Informatica, SAS or SAP/Business Objects do not come cheap.

Introduction Over the past years, Microsoft has been building –slowly but certainly- its Business Intelligence & Performance Management vision & product stack. Despite Microsoft's roots and its reputation for building user friendly end-user products, most of the work in the last 5-10 years was in the underlying architecture of the database, OLAP structures & ETL-layer.

Introduction In the last decade the business intelligence market has been relatively fragmented with a lot of different vendors offering open solutions, which were designed to operate with a large variety of different databases, data-sources (ERP, CRM, SCM …), operating systems, portal technologies and web/application servers. Consolidation in the BI market had been forecasted and rumored for many years, but finally happened with a vengeance in 2007.

Spreadsheets are everywhere. They enable us to quickly perform analysis that would otherwise be difficult or time consuming to prepare. We all use them because we love the flexibility that comes with them and the undue trust we trend to place in the integrity of the analysis that we prepare. Even to drive strategic decision and to deliver operational and financial plans and analyses, most organizations rely heavily on the spreadsheet.

2007 has been quite an amazing year for the market of Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management. More than 15 billion $ was spent in Mergers & Acquisitions, mainly by the software industry giants SAP, Oracle & IBM, to acquire the crown jewels of the BI & CPM market.

IntroductionAs solutions for Planning & Budgeting further merge with solutions for "classical” Business Intelligence, Performance Management professionals increasingly need to reflect on an information technology architecture that delivers on the promise of integration of both historical & future data.First, we will look into the most common reasons for deploying Planning & Budgeting solutions. Secondly, we will address the optimal architecture in which to fit these systems and what crucial role the data warehouse needs to play.