The news is that Microsoft announced it has agreed to acquire ProClarity.

Now a decent client for Analysis Services 2005 will be available from Microsoft, and I hope that a new commercial licensing scheme will allow to small companies to get a mixed combination of (many) Excel and (few) ProClarity desktop clients. I often have customers who have no more than 2/3 users that could really leverages on ProClarity features, while other can use Excel or predefined (Reporting Services) reports to see daily updated data.

But I think the real reason for the acquisition is to get a really strong and consistent portfolio of BI products to play very hard into the growing BI market.