Andrew Burst recently gave quite an interesting talk at the MS BI Conference entitled "How does the MSFT BI Stack... stack up?".  Wanted to share the link with the group - it's worth a watch, silverlight player is required: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIP201.

The first half of the presentation is a recap of the vendor space covering most of the major players, including the leading commercial open source vendors. The second half focuses on MSFT positioning, product line, admitted gaps, round-out with 3rd-party partnership and cost comparisons.  Somewhere in the middle is a single-slide stack comparison of discussed players. 

Andrew is a MSFT BI evangelist currently involved with the PowerPivot initiative.  However, this is a rather objective pro-MSFT perspective - as Andrew's talks tend to be.  

I am working on having MSFT in for a session on High Performance Analytics, to round out presentations from AsterData, upcoming ParAccel, and possibly others.  Treat this video as a great precursor to their upcoming visit.

PS Stick around for the Q/A as it has commentary on vendors not covered in the presentation.

PSS If you have talks, videos, and other BI content you generate and wish to share, please send it through so that it doesn't look like I'm am solely peddling Andrew's work.  Thanks, Andrew. :)

Regards,

Yuriy