Microsoft was named a leader in the Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI Platforms, Q3 2021 report.
Forrester Wave™
What (or who) exactly is Forrester Wave™ and why does their opinion matter you may ask. With a company as large and well renowned as Microsoft, a smaller company’s kudos should not be newsworthy, however they have made their name through utilizing transparent methodology to make comparisons between the companies selling software, hardware, and services.
Forrester Wave™ offers a guide for buyers of all sizes who are considering purchasing options in the technology marketplace. They follow a publicly available methodology which is applied consistently and fairly across all vendors who elect to participate, and for those who don’t, they have a publicly available ‘Incomplete Vendor Participation Policy’ as well. This service allows professionals in the market for new technologies to see an analysis of competing vendors’ products and services, as well as Excel spreadsheets to easily compare products and evaluate based on their individual requirements. Their methodology is publicly available and has been sourced from the webpage Forrester Wave™ Methodology. Additionally, you can visit the main webpage by following this link.
Augmented BI Platforms
This specific evaluation focused on Augmented BI capabilities that allow and empower users to become full-fledged data scientists. Most people would think that they need an advanced degree to provide BI insights, and in many cases, they would be correct. This is part of the reason Power BI was created by Microsoft, and why it is so popular. Instead of spending years learning about how to manage both data and databases, as well as filtering them into useful insights, several companies (including Microsoft) have created solutions to empower any user to augment and filter data through a software that does most of the heavy lifting. I will go into more detail about Power BI in its own section.
The competition was fierce this time around, with names like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce in the mix, each bringing its own product to evaluate. I am going to focus on these vendors because, in my opinion, they are the most prevalent names out of the group.
At the very beginning of the vendor profiles section, Microsoft, is immediately listed as one of the ‘Leaders’, and for good reason. With many businesses already utilizing and storing data on Azure, Power BI stands out as there are already 32 out-of-the-box machine learning models for business users. Utilizing these machine learning models takes minimal experience, and can be set up using already familiar, and easy to use code. This code is very similar to Excel, if you want to find a total, you use =(sum), and so on.
Power BI
Out of the 15 vendors that were analyzed, Microsoft’s Power BI came out on top for both ‘Current Offering’ and ‘Strategy’ with scores of 4.35 and 4.8 out of 5. The runner up in each of these categories scored 3.98 and 4.2 respectively, but each of those scores is from a different company. Microsoft leads the pack with their renowned Power BI platform, and almost everyone that has utilized Power BI for one reason or another will attest to this.
I would refer those who are looking for more information to read my previous Power Apps and BI Services Blogs as I have written extensively on the subject. Conversely, you can also visit the Microsoft Power BI Webpage to get more specific information on success stories, pricing, and more. Microsoft has been popping up in the news more and more recently, and I await the next exciting headline to write about.