A multi-billion dollar liquor distributor runs an expensive promotional campaign every year, but can only guess if it actually boosts profits.  A top five US retailer experiences a supply chain disruption, and the office of its President urgently needs to quantify the impact.  A social media network collects millions of data points each day but has no way to track whether users signing up this year are being retained better than last year’s signups.

 

In the past, answering each of these literal million-dollar questions would have been the focus of a massive, expensive, and time consuming Business Intelligence project, if it were tackled at all.  But in recent months, all of these real-world problems were quickly resolved by a small team of business users and a SharePoint 2010 feature known as PowerPivot.

 

Sophisticated business calculations.  Analysis “mashups” that cross-reference multiple data sources.  Interactive dashboard applications.  All created without a single line of code, and not by BI professionals, but by the business unit experts themselves.  All firmly anchored in, and empowered by, SharePoint 2010.