PerformancePoint Server may be dying a slow death, but a number of its component parts live on.
Microsoft announced today that it will make the source code of PerformancePoint Server's financial planning component, called Financial Planning Accelerator (FPA), available to customers and partners on a "no-cost, individual license" basis.
That means they will be able not just to continue using and reselling FPA but also to continue customizing it, something Microsoft no longer does, as a consequence of its decision, made in January, to
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shutter new versions of PerformancePoint Server and put the product into what
is essentially a permanent maintenance mode.
As part of its January decision, Microsoft also said it would incorporate its scorecard and dashboarding capabilities into future releases of SharePoint Server to expand their reach, plans which this announcement does not change.
During an interview with SearchDataManagement.com editors in April, Guy Weismantel, Microsoft's marketing director for business intelligence, said that PerformancePoint Server's corporate planning features had not sold as well as expected. But some interest remained, he said, and today's decision to make FPA's source code available was due mainly to customer and partner feedback.
"We received a lot of requests from customers and partners who have been developing on the [FPA] code and have a lot of uses for it that they be able to have access to it," Weismantel said. Specifically, a number of partners have developed industry-specific versions of FPA that they want to continue updating and reselling.
