Blends the Strengths of Excel and Traditional BI

Before PowerPivot, businesses faced an impossible choice between the agility and low startup costs offered by Excel versus the robustness and low ongoing costs of “real” BI systems. Once you started down one road or the other to fill a particular need, you were then committed to that method’s shortcomings – the steep long-term costs of relying on spreadsheets or the prohibitive startup costs and rigidity of BI.

PowerPivot delivers the low maintenance costs and reliability of industrial-strength BI while preserving the agility and low startup costs of spreadsheets.

Excel Gets a Proven BI Engine Under the Hood

PowerPivot is the result of a multi-year cooperative project by the BI and Excel teams at Microsoft, during which the BI team’s market-leading BI engine (Analysis Services) was extensively re-thought and adapted into the Excel environment. PowerPivot’s ability to bridge the longstanding gap is no accident, since it is the union of the world’s leading spreadsheet and the world’s leading BI engine.

But just as critically, the hybrid was 100% designed to meet the pre-existing skillsets of today’s Excel users – it is much more natural for them to adopt than any “pure” BI tool because it IS the tool they are familiar with, and speaks their language of PivotTables, formulas, charts and grids.

Cost-Saver For Any Size Organization, Any Size Need

As an extension to Excel’s existing toolset, PowerPivot is a fit for any business organization where Excel is used today, from small- and mid-sized companies to the largest corporations in the world. It is both a natural way to “break into” BI for a fraction of the traditional cost and an agility-providing complement to existing BI systems. Pivotstream provides PowerPivot-fueled BI environments for companies ranging in size from one employee to tens of thousands.

Highlights include:

• Capacity to handle any data volume – from hundreds to hundreds of millions of rows
• Automatic scheduled refresh – no more wasted time manually updating spreadsheets every day
• Formulas that automatically adjust to changing needs and report shapes – saves time versus Excel alone and enables entire new classes of insights
• Security for your intellectual property – let the business interact with your sensitive data and business rules while maintaining complete security and confidentiality
• Measured ROI ten times greater than that of traditional BI implementations