Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021 – survey results
Another edition of the Magic Quadrant report, prepared annually by Gartner on Business Intelligence solutions available on the market, has been released. As in previous years, Microsoft is now the leader. What is the reason for another high position on the podium? Thanks to Microsoft Office and its comprehensive and visionary product roadmap, this company has a vast market reach. Microsoft provides better and easier data preparation, visualisation, the ability to present data sets as interactive dashboards and enhanced data analytics in Power BI.
Notably, Microsoft is releasing weekly updates to its cloud-based Power BI service, which has been enhanced with hundreds of brand new features in 2020. Noteworthy additions include more augmented analytics in the form of artificial intelligence-based experiences, including intelligent narratives (NLG) or anomaly detection capabilities for custom visualisations.
What strengths of Power BI did Gartner identify?
Compatibility with Office 365 and Teams
The Power BI service in Office 365 E5 has led many companies to start using it. Additionally, the integration of Power BI with Microsoft Teams has become more important during the pandemic and rapid growth in remote working popularity. As experts point out, the Power BI service is now also a frequently considered option among Gartner customers when choosing BI platforms.
Price/Power relationship
The Power BI service development has drastically reduced the price of tools in the BI platform market since its launch. However, in this case, the low price does not mean limited functionality. The Power BI service available in the cloud is extremely rich in its capabilities, including enhanced analytics and automated ML functions. Artificial intelligence-based services such as text, opinion, and image analysis are available in the Power BI Premium service and build on the Azure platform’s capabilities.
Product development plans
Microsoft continues to invest in a broad set of innovative capabilities and integrate them into Power BI. There are currently 80,000 customers using AI services in Power BI deployments. For example, Microsoft continues to encourage use at scale by using ML-based automatic optimisation of materialised views in Azure Synapse (and soon other data sources including Snowflake and Redshift) to adjust query performance automatically.
Why do companies choose Microsoft Power BI?
According to a report presented by Gartner, Power BI has already helped more than 250,000 organisations, including 97% of the Fortune 500, to develop their data culture. More and more companies are standardising the Power BI service to a greater extent, thereby empowering everyone in their organisation to make data-driven decisions.
Among the key factors why companies are choosing to implement Microsoft Power BI are:
1. The ability to integrate with Excel and Microsoft Teams,
2. Option to aggregate data from anywhere thanks to hundreds of built-in connectors with Power Query,
3. Rapid building of intelligent systems with Power BI + Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics,
4. The ability to intuitively move from insight to action with Microsoft Power Platform,
5. High level of data loss protection with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security,
6. Relying on industry-leading AI technology to help quickly find answers to business users’ questions,
7. Best-in-class mobile experience with Power BI Mobile,
8. Cloud maturity, which is one of the largest and fastest-growing BI clouds,
9. Focus on innovation – new features are introduced weekly based on feedback gathered from users,
10. Diversified variants of BI solutions available for companies from different industries and of various sizes.
Analytics and business intelligence platforms are characterised by easy-to-use functionality that supports the full data flow – from preparation to visualisation and sharing. No wonder they are steadily gaining in popularity.
