It’s been 4 years since Microsoft announced general availability for the Power BI platform. Since the introduction of Power BI, Microsoft has not only proven that they could compete with the leaders in the enterprise BI space, but they had the market strength and investments to displace leaders in the category.
A recent Forrester Wave report has highlighted Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise BI and shows Power BI as the industry-leading enterprise BI platform (vendor-managed). In Forrester’s evaluation, Microsoft Power BI outranked the competition in both strategy and market presence.
Market Leadership
It’s also important to note that since the last Forrester Wave evaluation, Microsoft Power BI has leapfrogged the competition. Microsoft has addressed most of the functionality requirements that are consistent with modern enterprise BI platforms.
We have seen a steady stream of new features being added to Microsoft Power BI and an active community of users that have had significant influence on the direction Microsoft is taking with the product. We believe that this innovative approach has had a lot of impact on helping Microsoft secure the top spot in the “Leaders” category.
The Future of Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft has “bet big” on a self-service business analytics tool and it’s paying off. The ability to interact with data is allowing organizations to make better (quicker) decisions, gain insights, and recognize trends.
So far, the Microsoft BI platform has proven affordable, flexible and innovative. It also integrates well with other applications making it easy to produce intuitive dashboards on the fly!
The Forrester report seems to recognize that strength and relevance of Power BI and states,
“Organizations should consider Power BI as their main enterprise BI platform before looking elsewhere, especially those that use Office 365.”
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise BI Platforms (Vendor-Managed), Q3 2019
Self-Service Business Applications are Changing the Game
Power BI has joined two other products in the Microsoft portfolio. The trio of products (Flow, PowerApps and Power BI) make up what Microsoft is calling the Power Platform. The Power Platform products are designed to work together and enable everyone the ability to quickly and easily build custom apps, automate workflows to improve business productivity, and analyze data for insights—no matter their technical expertise.
The Power Platform is providing everyone in the organization with tools to quickly assess and improve their business without having to rely on I.T. It’s being called “self-service and Microsoft is leading the way in bringing applications and tools that were built for users and do not require advanced technical “know-how”.
To learn more about the leading enterprise BI platforms, you can download the full report from Forrester here.
If you’d like a demonstration of Power BI or see a few of the dashboards we built using the tool, please contact us!