By Zach Thomas

As you may, or may not, know Forrester has one of the most rigorous Total Economic Impact (TEI) – or ROI methodologies out there. "The ROI Of Packaged Apps Instance Consolidation" and "The ROI Of Interactive Chat" are a couple of completed TEI reports (you need client access to view these reports) and below is a graphical representation from the second report, to give you a flavor.

Microsoft announced today that it is discontinuing the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server product. The business performance monitoring and analytics capabilities of PerformancePoint will be bundled into the SharePoint Server enterprise license (CAL) going forward, and no longer sold separately. The planning and budgeting capability of PerformancePoint will see a midyear enhancement that is already in the works, and then put into support mode. Existing PerformancePoint customers will receive support on these products for 10 years. Another element of the announcement is the return of FRx reporting and forecasting capabilities to the Microsoft Dynamics business applications group.

After investing heavily in the development and launch of PerformancePoint over the past 3 years, it is a major shift in strategy for Microsoft to essentially kill off the product initiative. Its rationale is that the goal is to make business performance monitoring and analytics pervasive across the enterprise, and SharePoint is the best vehicle to carry this functionality. Microsoft expects that bundling these capabilities at no additional cost within the SharePoint enterprise license will accelerate sales of SharePoint, including upgrades from the standard license. Planning, meanwhile, is seen as a Finance desk application that is not part of the SharePoint strategy.

By Zach Thomas

HR Technology (not “tech” according to show chairman Bill Kutik) was again a success despite economic woes constricting travel budgets — or maybe it was highly attended because arrangements to get to the windy city were made a few months back. In any case, here are some key take aways:

11th Annual Analyst Panel: I was invited to participate in the highest attended analyst panel session (1,268 people to be exact) alongside other leading analysts and consultants. View the results. The topics varied from Web 2.0 to the impact this economy will have on product sales. Bill Kutik (moderator) asked the audience a series of questions with electronic voting. One interesting tidbit is that two-thirds of user companies did not expect their HR technology spend to get cut. We will have the exact numbers later this week — can’t wait to see the raw numbers.

Monster today announced their acquisition of Mountain View, Calif. based Trovix for $73 million in an all cash deal. Trovix was known as an applicant tracking system (ATS) vendor and have amassed over 40 customers during their short tenure, but that was not their passion. Instead, they were fully focused on perfecting and innovating search technologies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between jobs and candidates and find the perfect match for both. So what does Monster get and what are they going to do with Trovix?