Microsoft Power BI leader in latest Gartner Magic Quadrant February 23, 2017 Erwin Bisschops Data In July 2015 I wrote an article about how the then recently released and completely revamped Microsoft’s Power BI contributed to the democratisation of BI. Prior to that major release, Power BI was just a number of Excel add-ins called Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query and Power Map. In February 2016 Microsoft was already the leader in the right upper quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, and they have clearly managed to further strengthen this position. Why? I’ll take you briefly through the main criteria according to Gartner later on, but I would like to first give you my personal take as to why this has been a special journey so far. It is all about vision, and Microsoft has been executing fantastically on this through their boldly crafted Power BI Roadmap. The main change they introduced 18 months ago was that they communicated this clear roadmap for the development of the platform, whilst carefully listening to an engaged user community. Microsoft has been able to turn a somewhat stale development landscape into a vibrant, democratic and community driven ecosystem. You can request new features via a voting mechanism and the features with the most votes get tackled in each consecutive Redmond development sprint. I’ve voted for many features, and every time Microsoft kept me up to date through personalised emails and messages about the progress (“your requested feature will go into the next sprint” and “your requested feature has been developed and will be available in the next release”). Gone were the days where you had to wait for 2 years to receive much needed updates, since the Power BI desktop updates get pushed through on a monthly basis and the online version receives weekly updates. One of my votes to most recently hit the production stage is the ability to embed live dashboards in SharePoint Online. Another fine example of how well Microsoft listens to the global community, is that they greatly improved the navigation interface; users vented their concern about this aspect of the Power BI Online Service (“too much clutter in the left hand navigation pane” and “hard to find frequently-accessed content”). Below are two screenshots, one of the old navigation and one of the new, greatly improved navigation. Recent exciting additions also included the option to subscribe via email to changes in Power BI reports and the ability to download Power BI reports (PBIX files) from the Power BI service so you can edit these in Power BI desktop. Now let’s have a look at the recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms as of February 2017. What is interesting to highlight, is that the various vendors are assessed according to a set of 15 critical capabilities: Infrastructure 1. BI Platform Administration, Security and Architecture 2. Cloud BI 3. Data Source Connectivity and Ingestion Data Management 4. Metadata Management 5. Self-Contained Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) and Data Storage 6. Self-Service Data Preparation Analysis and Content Creation 7. Embedded Advanced Analytics 8. Analytics Dashboards 9. Interactive Visual Exploration 10. Smart Data Discovery 11. Mobile Exploration and Authoring Sharing of Findings 12. Embedding Analytic Content 13. Publish, Share and Collaborate on Analytic Content Overall Platform Capabilities 14. Platform Capabilities and Workflow 15. Ease of Use and Visual Appeal Besides these capabilities, the vendors are held up to the light to see if they truly support 5 key business use cases: 1. Agile Centralised BI Provisioning 2. Decentralised Analytics 3. Governed Data Discovery 4. OEM or Embedded BI 5. Extranet Deployment Based on these criteria and use cases, Power BI has firmly cemented its position as THE leader in this market segment. You can read the full Gartner report here. Tags:Data Analytics Gartner Magic Quadrant Power BI Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Previous Next
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