For the 14th time, Gartner selected Microsoft as the leading analytics and business intelligence platform provider in its annual analysis that helps companies plan analytics and BI roadmaps. In addition, Microsoft was ranked the best for the third time in a row regarding vision and its ability to deliver on that vision.
Gartner highlights Microsoft in the following aspects: attractive pricing, a compelling roadmap, advanced analytics, machine learning development, and a functioning ecosystem.
According to Gartner, with the release of Microsoft’s Power BI tool, the prices of similar tools have dropped across the analytics and business intelligence markets. In addition, the straightforward pricing of Power BI has also received praise. Since the release of Gartner’s analysis, Microsoft has launched, for example, a new Power BI Premium per User licensing model that brings Premium features to an even broader user base through a low-cost user-specific licensing model.
Gartner highlights Microsoft’s ambitious strategy and works to develop Power BI. In addition, Microsoft leaps ahead of its competitors in both aspects of Gartner’s assessment: the completeness of the vision and the ability to deliver on that vision.
Gartner notes that Microsoft has a very comprehensive market share and a broad and visionary service offering and roadmap. The main strength of Power BI’s roadmap is that the tools are updated frequently, and features are constantly added. Power BI offers, among others, the ability to edit and analyze data in a visual format, as well as interactive reports, and advanced analytics. Power BI tools can be used either as a SaaS in Microsoft Azure or locally using Power BI Report Server.
Power BI Service offers comprehensive capabilities in advanced analytics and automated machine learning. With Power BI Premium licensing, there are even more possibilities, e.g. text, emotion, and image analytics that uses artificial intelligence.
The popularity of Power BI’s artificial intelligence services is increasing among organizations, and Microsoft invests even more to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the future, various Azure services will use machine learning, e.g. to optimize the performance of database queries. It also reflects on the results of the vision readiness scale.
Microsoft has a robust product family for data work, e.g. Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and Teams – not to mention the world’s most widely used data tool, Excel. Power BI integrates even more firmly into the Microsoft product family, increasing its value, especially among M365 and Teams service users. And Gartner does state that many organizations ask, “Should we choose Power BI?” instead of asking, “Which BI tool should we choose?”.
Microsoft and the Power BI tool provide an easy way to take your company’s data maturity to the next level. It enables companies to spend their time working with data instead of looking for it.
Download the complete Gartner analysis here.
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