ProClarity

» see proclarity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Some software is only ever met at work, by people whose job title contains the word analyst, and ProClarity was that all the way through. I never opened it. There was no consumer version and no free tier worth downloading, and nothing about it ever reached a university machine in Ankara. It earns a page here on the strength of its ending, the quietest one in this whole category and the one most enterprise software actually gets.

The company began in 1995 in Boise, Idaho, as Knosys Inc., and spent six years being named one thing while its customers called it another. In 2001 it gave up and renamed itself after the product. ProClarity sat on top of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and did the part Microsoft had not done: it made an OLAP cube something a person could actually interrogate, instead of a data structure you wrote queries against and hoped.

Microsoft noticed, and on 3 April 2006 it bought the company outright. ProClarity became a wholly owned subsidiary and kept its Boise offices, a detail the staff took as a good sign. The purchase was part of a bigger assembly job. Microsoft was building a business intelligence stack by acquisition in those years, and ProClarity was the analysis and visualization piece going into what would ship as PerformancePoint Server 2007.

~ the dossier ~

~ the decomposition tree ~

The feature people remember is the decomposition tree. You started from one number, total revenue say, and broke it down by a dimension, then broke one of those branches down by another dimension, and kept going, with the tree drawing itself as you went and each node sized by its share. It turned the question "why is this number wrong" into a sequence of clicks instead of a sequence of queries.

That sounds ordinary now because every BI tool does some version of it. In 2003 it was not ordinary at all. Analysis Services could compute the answer to almost anything you asked, and asking required MDX, a query language with a reputation for making competent SQL developers feel stupid. ProClarity's real product was removing MDX from the room. The performance map alongside it did the same job for comparisons, laying out hundreds of items by two measures at once so the outliers found you.

~ eleven years on the support calendar ~

After the acquisition the work went into PerformancePoint, then into Excel and SharePoint, then eventually into Power BI. ProClarity itself stopped moving. Version 6.3 was the last one, and from there the product existed as an entry in Microsoft's lifecycle database with two dates attached to it: mainstream support ending 10 July 2012, extended support ending 11 July 2017.

That second date is the death, and the mechanism deserves stating plainly. No server went dark anywhere, and any organization with an install can technically still run the thing today. What ended was Microsoft's obligation, and in an enterprise that is the same thing as the end, because the compliance people will not sign off on an unsupported component and the budget to replace it finally gets approved. Eleven years passed between the purchase and that date, with the last five of them spent as a product nobody was writing and nobody could quite finish removing.

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