Microsoft Power BI is increasingly being recognised as the tool of choice for enterprise scale analytics and business intelligence (ABI). Here we look at some of the reasons why companies are adopting Power BI as part of their enterprise digital strategy.
Power BI is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, a fast-growing Microsoft product area that enables fast and cost-effective user-driven transformation of business processes. The integration of Power BI analytics into business processes enables organisations to become data-driven.
Aligning that power to the investments that companies have made in their cloud-based data platforms, means that the benefits of data democratisation can now be realised.
For the fourteenth consecutive year, the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms (https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?ct=210107&id=1-24ZXJ0MU&st=sb) placed Microsoft as a leader, both as a visionary and in terms of ability to execute. The specific strengths identified by Gartner include:
- User platform integration across Office 365 and Teams. Gartner identified that “why not Power BI?” is effectively the ABI platform selection question most organisations are asking of Gartner’s client inquiry service.
- The Power BI cloud service is both extremely function rich and competitively priced, with users having access to automated machine learning capabilities, augmented analytics, and AI-powered services
- Microsoft continues to invest in a broad set of visionary capabilities and to integrate them with Power BI.
Power BI’s integration with established Microsoft applications, the Power Platform, and the Azure cloud platform means that for companies already invested in the Microsoft environment, it is the logical next step in enabling users to directly realise value from enterprise data.