<p>Analytic decision support that can be delivered rapidly and flexibly is an invaluable asset. Microsoft's promise of out-of-the-box business intelligencefunctionality was long since fulfilled in SQL Server 2005, but access to thatfunctionality has largely been confined to people who were SQLServer-proficient. Only now, with SharePoint2013, is that functionality available on the business side, free of deepdependency on IT.</p><p>Increasingly, analytics is an ad hoc tool of decision-makersand stakeholders. Strategic advantage is increasingly a thing of the past, andrapid response is the greatest strength of the enterprise. Analytic decisionsupport that can be delivered rapidly and flexibly is an invaluable asset, andwith the new SharePoint release, Microsoft has made its best offering yet, witha toolset that requires little or no IT intervention to be effective innon-technical hands.Big data on littledesktops</p><p>The catch-22 of analytics is that big data is the best fuelfor powering it - more data means better results - but working with hundreds ofmillions of rows of information doesn't happen neatly on the working manager'sdesk. The resulting trade-off, historically, has been the ability to do limitedad hoc analytics locally with modest batches of data (via Excel), versus staticanalytics from big data using custom apps or third-party packages. There's beenalmost no middle ground.</p><p>But the growing need in the marketplace has been big dataprocessing power for ad hoc analytic solutions. The entire point of businessanalytics is to clear noise from signal in leveraging data for decisionsupport; what constitutes noise and signal differs in big data,problem-to-problem. Excel is an ideal tool for ad hoc analysis, ubiquitous inthe marketplace, and not difficult to learn; but getting the right data into ithas been problematic, even via ExcelServices (part of SharePoint since 2007), and getting enough data into it has been flatly impossible.Pitching big datafrom the back end</p><p><a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/big-data-analytics/sharepoint-2013-supporting-analytics-on-the-back-end/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://sqlmag.com/blog/building-real-world-microsoft-bi-dashboards-today">Building Real-World Microsoft BI Dashboards Today</a> (SQL Server Pro (blog))</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dSNz-Nm5uEBDIFMDyOpUxjbFi2oBM&ned=us">23 additional articles.</a></p>