For 14 consecutive years, Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and business intelligence platforms. It has a massive market reach through Microsoft Office and a comprehensive and visionary product roadmap.

This blog will talk about the Power BI features that we believe helped (again) position Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and BI.

Power BI a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

This year, Gartner evaluated Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms based on twelve areas that it defines as crucial capabilities:

  • Security
  • Manageability
  • Cloud Analytics
  • Data Source Connectivity
  • Data Preparation
  • Catalogue
  • Automated Insights
  • Data Visualization
  • Data Storytelling
  • Natural Language Query (NLQ)
  • Natural Language Generation (NLG)
  • Reporting

Microsoft offers data preparation, interactive dashboards, augmented analytic and visual-based data discovery in Power BI – available as a SaaS option running as an on-premises option in Power BI Report Server or the Azure cloud. Microsoft Power BI Desktop can be used as a stand-alone, free analysis tool. Power BI Desktop installation is required when power users authorize complex data mashups involving on-premises data sources.

Microsoft also releases a weekly update to its cloud-based Power BI service, which got hundreds of features in 2020. Some of the notable additions include more augmented analytics in the form of AI-infused experiences, including intelligent narratives (NLG) and anomaly detection capabilities for out-of-the-box visuals.

Strengths of Power BI

  • Alignment with Office 365 and Teams: The inclusion of Power BI in the Microsoft/Office 365 E5 SKU has provided an enormous channel for the platform’s spread, making it “self-seeding” in many organizations. The increasing integration of Power BI into Microsoft Teams, with its tens of millions of daily active users, will further increase Power BI’s reach in the world of remote working. Power BI is now often the option that organizations have in mind when using Gartner’s client inquiry service to ask about ABI platform selection — “why not Power BI?” is effectively the question most are asking.
  • Price/power combination: The influence of Power BI has drastically reduced the price of tools in the ABI platform market since its launch. In this case, though, low price does not equate to limited functionality. The Power BI cloud service is extremely rich in its capabilities, including an enlarged set of augmented analytics and automated ML capabilities. AI-powered services, such as text, sentiment and image analytics, are available within Power BI Premium and draw on Azure capabilities.
  • Scope of product ambition: Microsoft continues to invest in a broad set of innovative capabilities and integrate them with Power BI. It now claims to have 80,000 customers using AI services in Power BI deployments. It continues to encourage usage at scale by, for example, applying ML-driven automatic optimization of materialized views on Azure Synapse (and soon other data sources, including Snowflake and Redshift) to autotune query performance.

Learn more about Power BI

Business Intelligence is an excellent opportunity for companies that want to ride the wave of data-driven decision-making and forecasting.

With Microsoft Power BI, you can easily visualize and analyze data across your entire organization and gain a deep understanding of your operations and performance.

As a certified Power BI Gold partner in Canada, VOX ISM can guide you through every step of the way.

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