The BPM family will feature new dashboard tools and analytic applications for budgeting, planning and other financial tasks, analysts said.

Microsoft will also announce plans for shipping the visualization tools gained with its acquisition of ProClarity Corp. in April, analysts said.

Some of the products will be available later this year while others will ship next year, an analyst said.

Even though Microsoft seems poised to expand its BI initiatives, some users said they have already successfully replaced traditional BI tools with the vendor's SQL Server-based tools.

Goulds Pumps Inc., a subsidiary of ITT Industries Inc., last week began to move all of its 2,000 internal users to Reporting Services 2005, the reporting tool in SQL Server 2005, said systems analyst and database administrator Christopher Bellizzi.