Technology leaders have trusted Gartner and Forrester as technology visionaries for decades. Last week Microsoft’s Power BI was recognized as the Leader on the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. For the third consecutive year Power BI has ranked number one in the quadrant - establishing it as the top platform for its completeness of vision and ability to execute. A few months earlier the Forester Wave called out Power BI as the leader in the category: enterprise business intelligence platforms.
2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant
As organizations heavily invest in data analytics in 2020 – the adoption of Power BI has organically spread around the globe. Officially released on July 24th of 2015 – Power BI has reshaped the business intelligence landscape in just a few short years. Many believe it precipitated the acquisitions by Salesforce & Google of
other major business intelligence platforms in 2019. Our team at Fulton Analytics wanted to pause and examine the rapid growth of Power BI and the reasons behind the success. Listed below are 5 Reasons Why Power BI has become the industry leader in such a short period of time.
Business Value
Calculating the value of Power BI needs to factor in more than its $10/month price-point. The platform has empowered business users and organizations to move forward with their self-service analytics roadmap. Business users are demanding real-time analytics while organizations are seeking a strategy to eliminate data silos. Power BI is proof that self-service analytics and an enterprise data strategy can co-exist when many businesses questioned if this was ever possible. Power BI is being used to promote data exploration, data curiosity, data literacy – the foundation of a data-driven culture.
At the same time it provides a standardized platform – allowing IT to enforce data governance, data quality and data management practices when deemed necessary. Power BI is bridging the gap between IT and the ever changing business needs while providing an agile platform for data driven success.
User-Experience
The Tableau community might roll their eyes at this one. The fact is, Microsoft listened to the broader community and designed a platform with the life-long Excel user in mind. The user interface is designed with the same ribbon, right-click features and tabs across the bottom to make Excel users feel right at home. Monthly feature updates are voted on by the worldwide community of users. For decades, Excel users had been dreaming of a platform with more robust data ingestion, data mashup and data visualization capabilities. Power BI has made their dream come true.
Organic Adoption
I’ll let you in on a tiny little secret – Microsoft isn’t really trying to sell Power BI. What I mean is Microsoft sellers are barely compensated for selling a license. Instead they are focused on Azure, O365 and surface devices. What this means for you is there is no slick sales-person, fancy presentations, and 3-year contract terms. Satya Nadella and his team envisioned a product that would “sell itself” and build a community of cult-like followers. They’ve done just that. Four years later we are seeing this vision play out and Power BI spread organically within organizations and across industries.
“Perhaps the greatest competitive advantage for Power BI is that it is intertwined as part of an eco-system of powerful Microsoft Business Applications.””
Ecosystem
Perhaps the greatest competitive advantage for Power BI is that it is intertwined as part of an eco-system of powerful Microsoft Business Applications. Business users are intrinsically drawn to tools that can make them more efficient. Power BI can be fully integrated to your Office 365 environment. More and more companies are embedding Power BI reports into MS Teams, SharePoint and integrating these insights within Outlook, Excel and OneDrive. Power BI is part of Microsoft’s Power Platform – which includes Power Apps, Power Automate. The growing analytics platform also features modeling capabilities familiar to SQL Server developers. It also provides seamless integration for organizations leveraging Azure – Microsoft’s cloud platform. More than any other reason – this is why we believe Power BI will continue to dominate the marketspace in the years ahead.
Price-Point
This might be first on the list for some companies. Power BI has reshaped the landscape with its pricing model. This platform has ensured that analytics is no longer a lavish commodity for the few, but rather affordable for small to mid-size companies seeking to leverage real-time analytics as a competitive advantage. Power BI provides a Free Desktop Download. The ability to publish reports, share dashboards, and consume insights will cost you $10/month per user license. In the past, some competitors had charged 10x this amount for data visualization products. We believe the days of expensive stand-alone data visualization platforms have come to an end.
What’s Next For Power BI…
It’s likely your organization is already pumping out some incredible Power BI reports. It’s also likely that most of your company’s reports look strikingly similar to the Excel/SSRS reports you’ve used for the past decade. In 2020, we believe companies will implement frameworks to provide security, governance and administration frameworks for their Power BI environments. The same companies will look to increase performance and scalability by enhancing their data modeling capabilities in Azure. Companies will continue to move away from pie charts and tables in Power BI - and instead leverage custom visuals and data story telling to drive data literacy throughout their organization. After all, Power BI will only go as far as an organization’s ability to cultivate a data driven culture.
Robert Gerads is CEO of Fulton Analytics, a data analytics strategy and consulting firm based in St. Paul, MN. He is also the founder of the Twin Cities Power BI Meetup.