Self-service Business Intelligence Tools: Gartner Magic Quadrant Requirements Discussed – Microsoft remains “up and to the right” in Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, while its main competitors have moved down and to the left. We spoke with Microsoft’s Amir Netz, the “father” of Power BI, to gain insight into the product’s success.
The new Gartner Magic Quadrant on analytics and business intelligence (BI) is out, and Microsoft is once again in the “Leader” quadrant (see figure above). In fact, according to Microsoft, this is their 14th consecutive year as the leader in BI. While Microsoft is in roughly the same place as it was last year, its closest competitor has disappeared. Thoughtspot has fallen into the Visionaries quadrant. Qlik, when it has increased in the axis “completeness of the vision”, has appeared in the “ability to execute.” Tableau, meanwhile, regressed on both dimensions.
Self-service Business Intelligence Tools: Gartner Magic Quadrant Requirements Discussed
This gives Microsoft, and its Power BI juggernaut, a huge lead over the competition. And while it’s tempting to see Microsoft as some giant that wins because of its dominance and dominance in the industry, I can say – from personal experience – that’s not always the case. I’ve been working with the Microsoft BI stack since its inception in the late 90s, and I served on the company’s BI Partner Advisory Council (PAC) from roughly 2005 to 2011. During that time, Microsoft had the dominant BI server platform. in SQL Server Analysis Services, expertise on the side of application data visualization and self-service is usually characterized by 15 years of swinging and disappearing.
Power To The Users
So what has changed? What did Microsoft do right? And how do we achieve genuine performance on the BI platform side of the enterprise? To get some insight from Microsoft’s side, I had an hour-long conversation with Amir Netz, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, who is essentially the father of Power BI. Netz came to Microsoft from an Israeli BI company (now headquartered in Canada) called Panorama Software, after Microsoft bought technology from Panorama in 1996 that would eventually become Analysis Services. Since I first met him 15 years ago when I was a Microsoft BI PAC, I knew Netz was talented as a technologist, strategist and salesman. So I was interested in taking it, even though it was prepared for the promotional narrative.
Netz says that the traction and success that Power BI has achieved in its first two years of life is largely due to the product’s low cost (Power BI Desktop is free, as well as an entry-level cloud subscription), low-friction adoption that is affordable. point is activated and a very large and enthusiastic community of users/customers is born by both. They’re more likely to feel that going “everything” in the cloud, when most of the company’s data is still on-premises, is a big bet that pays off well. He attributes that decision, and his tenacity to see it through despite the product team’s deep skeptics, to James Phillips, Microsoft’s President of Business Applications. Phillips comes to Microsoft from Couchbase, where he was co-founder and CEO during the company’s early days. Although Netz didn’t say it, it’s pretty clear that bringing Phillips’ startup mentality to Microsoft made a big difference in Power BI’s success.
Perhaps related to Phillips, the Power BI team adopted a monthly update cadence for the product, adding new features to the product at an unprecedented rate. When I was at Microsoft BI PAC, platform updates could only be sent when SQL Server or Microsoft Office released a new version – which meant updates every 18 months, at best. Along with the night-to-day changes in the pace of innovation comes a new transparency, with members of the Power BI product team, including developers and program managers, engaging the community prolifically, through blogs and social media, as well as accompanying videos. monthly release of products.
That amount of community engagement really helps Power BI. While most people think that Microsoft can easily push new products due to its dominant market position, the reality is that new products at Microsoft face a tough battle, and they cannot compete with products from startups and other small companies. The reason is simple: Microsoft’s field salespeople have always focused on selling well-established high-ticket products and services, such as Office, SQL Server and now Azure, in order to achieve aggressive quotas. Conversely, field sales have very limited bandwidth to push new products at low prices. And unlike well-funded startups that hire their own corporate sales force, the product team at Microsoft has no such luxury.
Advantages Of Self Service Business Intelligence
But low prices and a great community can only get you so far. So what happens next, to sustain its growth? Netz said that all the breakthroughs Microsoft is making in the self-service BI space at the individual user and department level often lead to widespread enterprise adoption. And that means that the product must meet the demands of the company. Meanwhile, thanks to the legacy of Analysis Services (and the fact that Power BI and Analysis Services share core engine technology), Microsoft is ready for, and withstanding, the enterprise scalability test. Ultimately, Power BI is a tool that compensates for the lack of Microsoft’s self-service BI that used to be a platform that balances the strengths of both self-service and enterprise.
The introduction of Power BI Premium formalizes that duality. The relatively high cost of entry, starting at around $5,000 per organization / month (versus $10 per user / month for Power BI Professional) really makes better economic sense for large companies to target. On top of everything else, the enterprise push means that all professionals who have made a career in Microsoft’s enterprise BI stack can join the Power BI ecosystem and community. This is a proverbial win-win: these professionals gain new markets and can extend their franchises to the cloud, and Microsoft gains more momentum in the BI market.
Another distinctive feature of Power BI is its integration with other strategic Microsoft platforms. This includes Excel; Azure Synapse Analytics, the company’s cloud-based data warehouse and data lake analytics platform; Azure Machine Learning;Azure Purview, Microsoft’s data catalog and governance platform recently released in public preview; and, most importantly, especially in times of Pandemic, Microsoft Teams.
Netz said that the goal with the integration of Teams is to make data as basic as conversations and calendars, so that it can be one click, so that incidental analysis through serendipitous “want to know more?” scenario. Netz says that this cultural shift has already taken place at Microsoft, saying that data now includes 50 percent of good content in internal presentations to Microsoft leaders.
Self Service Bi
This has been a very long post, and there isn’t room to tell every aspect of the story, but I’ll close by pointing out that, as well as Power BI is done, it faces some challenges. For example, the lack of a Power BI Desktop client for Mac, disenfranchised Microsoft from the community of data scientists, developers, analysts and business users in the beginning who almost entirely avoided Windows. Back then, Tableau was also Windows only. This is addressed by offering a functional Web browser interface and a native Mac client. And that made it the default choice for the Mac-prone group.
Speaking of Tableau, the acquisition by Salesforce, which also recently acquired Slack, means that Power BI-Teams integration will soon see serious competition. Another problem, as Gartner points out in its report, is that Power BI naturally has a strong relationship with the Azure cloud, creating an adoption barrier for the gung-ho cloud crowd. Tableau, and independents like Qlik, Sisense and ThoughtSpot do not have that problem. And even Looker Google Cloud itself is more cloud agnostic, since it came to Google through acquisition.
So, yes, Power BI is here and it’s good. But we must keep looking over our shoulders, as the BI world will continue to be competitive, growth-driven and strategic, for our customers, enterprise software mega vendors, and public cloud providers. A good omen for Microsoft in all of this is the Power BI team
This, and be careful to keep the “old Microsoft”-style hubris in check. Perhaps most importantly, the team has maintained super high morale throughout the life of the product. In other words, the team is having fun. The result is a product that is fun to use, something that rubs off on partners, and on customers. It seems to help with the analyst company, too.
Four Ways To Build A Strong Foundation For Self Service Analytics
Related Can Microsoft recover from the collapse of its Surface business? Surface with numbers: How Microsoft reinvented the PC Microsoft quietly announced two business products this week, and they are brilliant for more than 10 years Gartner has published the famous Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and 2023 is no exception. Over the years, Salesforce’s Tableau and Microsoft Power BI have consistently demonstrated solid performance and strong capabilities in the Leaders quadrant. Tableau always scores high and Microsoft has done a great job positioning itself as ahead of Tableau. It’s not just the result of a fast development cycle
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