Like other Microsoft technologies, Microsoft’s BI has also helped many organizations to understand, explore and visualize data to make effective decisions. They also offer a library of data connectors to access cloud and in-house sources like Excel, SharePoint, Salesforce, Azure SQL Database, Dynamic 365 and so on.
BI Services
BI services – Self-service Analytical and BI tools, offered by one of the biggest tech-giant – Microsoft can help business analysts and BI professionals in quicker decision making. The AI-powered features of BI enable the organizations with automation and intelligence to better model the data and their visualizations.
For any organization, their data is their top priority and it must be handled carefully. Microsoft’s BI solution can maintain data security and data accuracy by following stringent security and privacy standards. At the same time, it can meet the requirements of service delivery, data residency, access, and control.
BI tools
Microsoft’s Power BI is easy to use and appears wherever decisions are to be made. Azure Analysis Services aids in browsing the huge amount of enterprise data and Azure Synapse Analytics helps in serving data for immediate BI and Machine Learning (ML) through a fully managed unified platform.
Competitor Analysis
The Business Intelligence (BI) tools and services offered by Microsoft are user-friendly and can be used by marketing and sales teams as well. They are cost-effective as compared to other players. They have more robust and advanced embedded analytics and are good at data source connectivity in comparison to other popular BI providers like QlikView, Tableau, and SQL Server Reporting Services. Microsoft’s BI tools are supported with platforms such as – Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Google Analytics, GitHub, comScore, Adobe Analytics, Circuit ID, Azure Mobile Management, Mailchimp, MS Excel, and significant others.
According to the ‘2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms’, Microsoft is a Leader with the following strengths of Microsoft’s BI services:
- Organizations already using Office 365 E5 also opt for Power BI Pro, albeit it is priced US$10 per user per month, this is can be because of self-seeding.
- Microsoft Office Excel encourages users to “visualize in Power BI” and thus have gained more exposure.
- Power BI Pro cloud service, 2019 was a huge success as it has more innovative capabilities for augmented analytics and AutoML (Automated Machine Learning).
- Furthermore, Power BI includes AI-powered services like text, sentiment, and image analytics.
