Boris Evelson of forrester has pickup up the news pretty fast and wrote a post about the next gen BI, naming project gemini as: “The latest Microsoft announcement takes it up a notch. Its Gemini tool (to be available for beta testing sometime in 2009 and general availability in 2010) will not only enable power users to build their own models and BI applications, but easily make them available to power users, almost completely taking IT out of the loop. In Gemini, the in-memory, on the fly modeling will be done via a familiar Excel interface. Once a new model and an application is built in Excel, a power user can then publish the application to Sharepoint, making it instantly available to casual users. Not only that, but the act of publishing the model to Sharepoint also creates a SQLServer Analysis Services cube, which can be instantaneously accessed by any other BI, even non Microsoft, tool. “
He closes his post with: ” I don’t have a crystal ball, but if I were a betting person, I would bet that BI applications will look and behave completely differently in 2 years. Who ever said that BI market is mature? “
Lets see where it all takes us.