Microsoft BI software hosted on Windows Azure is "clearly on our roadmap," Guy Weismantel, Microsoft's director of BI, told . However, it's "not a fully fleshed-out story. So it won't be the next release of Office 2010, but the one after that, that you'll see us get into cloud-based BI."

Microsoft releases a new major version of Office every three years.

Some competitors have already launched BI as a cloud-based service. Pentaho and Amazon.com launched , and did one startup,

Weismantel said that unlike those targeted solutions, Microsoft's future cloud BI offerings will be part of broader products that can help large enterprises move multiple pieces of infrastructure to the cloud one at a time.

In the meantime, Microsoft's BI software efforts continue to chug along, said Weismantel.