News
Yukon Will
Open New Frontier for Third-Party SQL Server Market
by Joe McKendrick
September 13, 2004
Not everyone is patiently biding his time waiting for
the much-delayed release of SQL Server 2005 (“Yukon”), now
anticipated to ship by the end of the first half of 2005.
Members of Microsoft’s network of business partner vendors see
the gold running in Yukon, and are ready to spring into action
with enhanced solutions. SQL Server 2005 is chock full of new
tools and capabilities, and partners and analysts say the
database platform is poised to vault to first place in leading
the burgeoning business intelligence and reporting space. It’s
now a matter of getting the product out to capture this
momentum.
Delay after delay in the planned release of the product has
some analysts concerned that Microsoft may lose this
opportunity for itself as well as solutions partners. “Who
knows when Yukon will ship?” says Mark Smith, analyst with
Ventana Research. “This long product cycle has cost Microsoft
growth they could have achieved if they would not have such
long major product releases. ISVs do not want to wait, and
have to ensure they operate across different stacks as
well.”
The delays have Microsoft’s partners chomping at the bit,
adds Rob Enderle, president of Enderle Group. “A new product
platform generally represents a strong upgrade revenue
opportunity for ISVs. Certainly IT buyers like it this way,
but ISVs live on product releases and the delays associated
with Yukon are becoming painful,” he says.
Still, other observers feel that Microsoft already has such
a potentially commanding presence in the market with SQL
Server 2000 that any delays won’t hurt at all. “Say Microsoft
delays Yukon for another six months. So what?” says Peter
DeBetta, an independent software consultant, trainer for
Wintellect, and author of Introducing Microsoft SQL Server
2005 for Developers (to be released October 2004). “SQL Server
2000 has been holding its own in the industry, and giving
Microsoft a much bigger market share. People said they
couldn’t compete with the Oracles and DB2s. Yet, here they
are, doing so with SQL Server 2000, which has been around for
four years. If it’s a question of putting out a better
product, and waiting six months to do so, I think it’s a
better choice for them. It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to
put out a better product, even if it’s delayed a little.”
In fact, some SQL Server business partners say that the
slow pace of releases has actually helped solidify Microsoft’s
presence in many enterprises – providing a platform set up and
ready for the latest database system. “The fact that Microsoft
is bundling in very powerful frameworks definitely plays into
our sales cycle, and how we position our products,” says
George McMann, president and CEO of BizNet Software. “A lot of
the people already have SQL Server 2000. They may already have
a newer version of Microsoft Office. They may already have one
or more instances of Windows Server 2003. So the costs for the
foundation are already sunk.”
Microsoft may even be missing out on an enormous
opportunity to more aggressively promote the BI capabilities
of SQL Server. “Yukon is a very sophisticated collection of
information technologies from DTS [Data Transformation
Services] to UDM [Unified Dimensional Model] to Reporting
Services,” Smith says. “In some cases, there’s even more
technology than organizations actually need. There is so much
in the box that they could make more impact to the market if
they packaged the tools outside of the database into some type
of BI package. Microsoft could really change the BI market
landscape. If they also could have shorter release cycles on
the package outside of the database, then we have a market
shaker.”
Microsoft – and by extension, business partners – could
then go after more lucrative prospects within larger
enterprises. DeBetta cautions that the traditional SQL Server
market is typically a cost-conscious group that prefers
customized solutions build with SQL Server tools to
pre-packaged third-party tools. “Third-party tools are cost
prohibitive,” he says. “There aren’t many companies that
aren’t willing to foot the bill for $2,000, $3,000 or $4,000
products, when the tools that SQL Server comes with will do
the job. And Yukon comes with a lot of tools. Vendors will be
offering features that still aren’t readily available, but
some of them are just going to have to change their approach
or pricing.”
Some Microsoft business partners, however, see far more
opportunity than threat in Microsoft’s new database. “We
really look forward to a lot of what Microsoft is doing in
Yukon,” relates Andy Coutts, president and CEO of Databeacon.
“As a vendor, we’re always looking for infrastructure to build
on. Clearly, Microsoft keeps putting more and more capability
into SQL Server that we can leverage.”
Of particular interest are new features in Microsoft’s
business intelligence line, including upgrades of Analysis
Services, Reporting Services (already released), and Data
Transformation Services (DTS). DTS in particular garnered the
enthusiasm of vendors interviewed for this article. According
to Microsoft, SQL Server 2005 DTS will provide developers with
enterprise-level extract, transform and load (ETL)
capabilities out of the box. DTS will also handle Web services
and XML sources, along with data cleansing, data mining and
text mining. “What they’ve done with DTS enables us to not
have to go down a path where we start brining our own ETL type
technology to our product,” says Coutts. “That’s an area where
we don’t really want to build it out, we think there’s lots of
value in SQL Server there.”
McMann of BizNet is equally excited about DTS. “The single
most important aspect of Yukon as it relates to our product
line is going to be the revamping of DTS,” he says. “We need
to merge the data, pull the data from different sources, and
merge it into a common view. In our market, the mid-market, we
can’t afford high-end middleware products; it would blow our
price-point right out of the water.” DTS within SQL Server
will provide a cost-effective ETL environment, McMann adds.
However, previous releases – which date back to the release of
SQL Server 7.0 – were too cumbersome to work with, he notes.
“In SQL Server 2000, it started to look very promising. But we
still don’t use it that much. One of the main problems we had
with it is when you connected different tables, it was too
easy to get misleading results. We wanted to have a single
connection string for all relevant data. DTS didn’t provide us
an easy way to do that, but it does with the next release of
SQL Server.”
Analysis Services represents another major enhancement that
add-on partners are anticipating. According to Microsoft,
Analysis Services is enhanced in SQL Server 2005 with
additional MDX expressions and new MDX script capabilities
designed to support complex and advanced modeling needs. In
addition, Analysis Services includes an online mode that
allows developers to develop applications in real time. “We
have a lot of enterprise installations of Analysis Services
with the 2000 release,” says Douglas McDowell, principal
consultant for Intellinet. “We have lots of clients on OLAP
Services. But there is going to be a dramatic difference with
Yukon. Microsoft basically went back and rewrote the product
from the ground up, and took a more enterprise architecture
approach to it, and matured the product dramatically. And
added tons and tons of features.”
SQL Server 2005 will represent a major upgrade for most of
Intellinet’s clients, McDowell adds. “They’re adding a
metadata layer – the Unified Dimensional Model – that will
allow organizations to facilitate better ad-hoc reporting
across heterogeneous databases,” he says. “It’s a paradigm
shift for the architecture of Analysis Services.”
However, the market is not standing still while Yukon
approaches its long-awaited debut. MySQL, an open-source
relational database, is now prevalent in 40 percent of
enterprise development shops, up over a third over the past
year, according to research from Evans Data Corp. Another
megasize database challenger, IBM, is making an aggressive
play for partners’ hearts, minds, and attention. “Microsoft is
more consistent then either Oracle or IBM and has a more
complete tools set surrounding their offering,” says Enderle.
“However, IBM currently has an aggressive program to capture
developers which, coupled with Microsoft’s less than stellar
image, may give IBM a leg up.”
Another strong competitor in this space, Oracle, is seen as
the Mercedes of databases, the vendor has been ham-handed with
partner relationships, analysts say. “Oracle’s relationship
with developers is often a love-hate thing – they are very
uneven and their developers seem to be really nervous about
company direction,” Enderle says.
Ventana’s Smith agrees that “the Oracle partner program is
basically not a priority anymore – it lacks substance and
focus. IBM has put a lot of muscle in their partner program.
Many of the enterprise-class technology vendors are now
swirling around IBM.”
However, Smith continues, Microsoft itself has not been
delivering a winning performance in vendor partner relations.
“Microsoft used to be much more outgoing as a partner,” he
explains. “My recent interaction with the SQL Server and AS
partners have indicated that at the product level the
partnerships go well, but at the go-to-market and field-level,
engagement is a bit lacking. They will throw money at the
partners and match dollar for dollar, but do not follow
through and help make events and programs real successful.
They are slow on support as well. We have been involved with
many of their partners in programs that have not been that
successful.”
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