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I remember VB 1.0 I was project leader 12 years ago on a job that needed a GUI visualization front-end (the core was a telephony application to be written in C). I could have had the front-end custom written in Motif with Unix workstations, but that would have been prohibitively expensive.

VB had been on the market for just one week, and I knew it was ragged and not mature. But it did the job. And it was dirt cheap.

And so with Data Analyzer. Sure, it's ragged and immature (no cross-tabs in the grid, for example). But at less than 200 bucks a pop, it's BI for the masses. Will it do the job? Maybe 70% of it. Compared to zero for most business users currently, that's a quantum leap. And all this thin/thick client business? What does a business user care about the techie stuff? Am I going to see about installing en masse into my clent base? Absolutely!

Your point about Business Objects etc is well taken. I put BO into my last two clients. It's fabulously powerful. But it's also several thou per seat! The one to worry about is Crystal Analysis. In my view, this is direct competition. Especially when I can put DA onto a hundred desktops for about 6K with volume discounts.

I expect to see DA bundled eventually. Probably not into Office, more likely into the SQL Server bundle. This one is a stayer. If I were an ISV Partner, I'd be losing sleep.

Unfortunately I was pretty disappointed by Data Analyzer. I was looking for a better OLAP interface than Microsoft Excel and this isn't it.

The majority of the interface centers around bar charts (though pie charts and data grids are also available). On the bar charts it is possible to assign one measure to the length of the bar and another measure to the color of the bar. Data Analyzer then creates a color gradient in hopes of showing you "good" and "bad" using color. This is actually a pretty neat feature, but I found it to be little more than eye candy. Personally I believe there are better graphical representations of multidimensional data.

The product does include a "Business Center" tool that allows you to ask canned questions against the data. One of these questions returns a similarity analysis. Again, a very neat feature, but not enough to justify the package.

Overall, I think Excel will serve as a good OLAP interface for most users. Beyond that, products such as ProClarity and BusinessObjects offer much more in terms of an "advanced" OLAP client.