Chris Webb made a few comments on the results for SSAS in the BI Survey 9. I think the most interesting point he brings up is the poverty of front-end tool use, particularly third party tools, for a low-priced database with an open interface. You would think third party vendors would make up a larger market share, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

After all one would expect third party vendors to flock to the tool, especially since it is already available at so many sites. (The latter claim is my speculative inference based on the fact that SSAS appears so seldom in competitive evaluations.) Of course there are plenty of third party vendors on SSAS, but they seem to make a relatively small dent in the market. We do see quite a few third party planning tools using Microsoft as a platform though.

I don't think that this is limited to SSAS however. Use of third party front-ends for other multidimensional databases such as TM1 and Essbase also seems relatively seldom.