Microsoft Leads the Pack with Power BI in Gartner's Magic Quadrant of BI and Analytics Solutions

We’re excited to share a special report released called the Magic Quadrant by Gartner, which does an analysis of BI platforms and shows how different competitors stack up against each other. We’re excited to say that one of the leaders when it comes to BI and analytics tools is Microsoft, and the primary push to the top comes from Power BI!

I took a dive deep looking into why Microsoft and Power BI led the pack in these areas and I’d like to share what I found. Gartner not only looks at why these tools are excelling now, but also what the BI platform will look like in the future and how these tools are already innovating and looking ahead.

First, let’s look at what impressed Gartner with the Microsoft applications and why it’s a good decision to use Microsoft tools like Power BI:

• Price – Cited by 12% of people as the second most important reason why they chose Power BI. The price that people paid to be able to implement solutions or get into the market with a BI solution with Power BI was much lower compared to many of its competitors.
• Ease of Use and Visual Appearance – 14% of customers cited the ease of use of Power BI as their main reason for buying it. Power BI is easy to get used to and is designed for people who are familiar with Excel. The programming language built in, called DAX, is very similar to Excel formulas.

    The way you can edit and transform your data with the Query Editor is simple, even for beginners. It has      an interface with Microsoft Q & A, with a natural query language behind it, that makes it easy to create          reports without much thought. This natural query language was frequently cited in the report as a                  benefit.         

• Product Vision – Microsoft got high marks on innovation and their ability to carry out that innovation, which put them far ahead of the competition. Updates to Power BI are done monthly, if not weekly. With new cool capabilities already being worked on for the future, such as viewing reports with VR goggles.
• Customer Experience – Power BI offers capabilities for both cloud and non-cloud users. It’s easy to access and set up no matter what your environment.

A few top reasons why customers chose Power BI as their top analytics platform solution:

1. High Value – Users can start free with Power BI, then purchase the capacity they need.

2. Comprehensive Analytics Solution – Capabilities allow users to model, analyze and author to deliver business insights.

3. Centralized Management – Organizations can deploy in minutes and distribute Power BI with just a few clicks.

4. Global Scale – The flexibility to deploy their BI solution where they reside with global presence provided through the Azure platform.

5. Security, Governance and Compliance – Organizations can rely on a BI platform that helps comply with stringent industry standards and keep their data secure.

Gartner also investigated the future of BI and analytics solutions, and some of the main points were:

• Through 2020 the number of citizen data scientists will grow 5 times faster than the number of expert data scientist. Gartner looked at what tools are lining up for this idea that citizen data scientists will be doing a lot of data exploration and enhancing what they can do without being an expert. Power BI ease of use fits into this factor.
• Also, the natural language generation and AI will be a standard feature of 90% of BI platforms, which Power BI is already doing.
• Augmented analytics – Power BI is already doing this with the natural language query language and automated and augmented analytics with Quick Insights.

Gartner looked at many factors in their research and it’s exciting to know that Microsoft and Power BI are aligned with industry standards now, as well as in the future, gaining them high marks in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics platforms. To learn more about incorporating the benefits of Power BI in your organization, visit our website. Need Power BI training? Check out our On-Demand Training platform with 9 courses in Power BI included in our 30+ courses in BI, Business Analytics, Big Data and more.