All change in the Gartner Analytics Magic Quadrant
It seems the significant effort Microsoft have been putting into their BI and Analytics offering over the last year has started to reap rewards.
Microsoft is now one of only 3 companies positioned as a leader in the 2016 Magic Quadrant, outperforming all rivals in terms of completeness of vision.
By comparison, rivals SAP and Oracle have seen a significant shift in the wrong direction, with Oracle dropping off the chart completely.
There’s a bit more to this than meets the eye – check back for a post from Simon exploring Gartner’s recommended “Bimodal Capability” – but the essential message is: There has been a major shift in the BI and Analytics landscape.
The advancements in Power BI usability, functionality and accessibility, combined with a growing eco-system of developers and users continually upgrading and improving the tools, has been key to securing Microsoft’s position.
Learning the lessons from the mobile market, Microsoft have set themselves up as the App Store of Big Data.
Power BI enables business users to get started quickly and easily, with an intuitive interface that will be familiar to the Excel users who’ve been keeping organisations running to time, despite protestations from data purists.
Empowering business users to undertake multi-dimensional analysis, direct from source systems, with a proper security and permissions framework, Power BI preserves the strengths of Excel while addressing the major weakness that make it unsuitable as an Enterprise BI platform.
So, is that it? Excel becomes Power BI and world hunger is solved?
If that were the case, we already have best of breed tools like Tableau and Qlik that have built up good reputations in their relatively short lives, clearly demonstrating the need for tools that are simple for the non-technically minded to get their heads round. Power BI has caught up, but who cares?
Lifting the hood, Microsoft reveals a complete end-to-end solution under the umbrella of the Cortana Analytics Suite, an integrated suite of tools that enables organisations to manage the ever expanding information landscape under one roof. Combined with flexible architecture options enabled by the Azure Cloud (more on this in later posts!), the major headaches of traditional Enterprise BI and Analytics begin to melt away.
From integrating data from multiple sources (structured and unstructured) to big data manipulation using Hadoop, through to advanced analytics and machine learning, Microsoft appear to have all bases covered. Power BI is in a sense the icing on the cake. And while its main rivals have been successful in “landing and expanding”, the attention is starting to turn to the parts of the stack that do the real heavy-lifting.
This is why Microsoft have stolen a march on the competition and are well placed to give us what we want.
As fissures open up in the analytics landscape, Microsoft have made a conscious effort to open up to open-source and position themselves as a platform company that balance the assurance of a major player with the flexibility of crowdsourced applications. Learning the lessons from the mobile market, Microsoft have set themselves up as the App Store of Big Data, securing their position with some cutting-edge proprietary tools of their own that we’ll explore in later posts.
Obviously the proof is in the eating. A future blog will report on how easy/difficult it is for a mild-mannered analyst to get his head around the Cortana Analytics Suite and produce something useful.
Watch this space!!
Naveed Urmani
