Top 9 Reasons why Power BI is a leader in Business Intelligence
In 2020, people created 1.7 MB of data every second & roughly 2.5 quintillion data bytes per day. For reference: Quintillion has 18 zeros, and a Terabyte has 12 (This is likely your PC/Laptop’s Storage). If you want to count this as WhatsApp Messages, then it would roughly be sending or receiving 22950 messages every second.
So, if you had the question: How much data do we generate? The answer would be — A LOT! But with all the structured and unstructured data being created every second, two important aspects of data are of key importance:
- Data Management
- Data Analysis and Visualization
Let’s talk about Data Management on another day. But Data Visualization is important to utilize and analyze the data to gain insights. With so many self-service data visualization tools in the market, with the three Leaders being Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik, there must be a reason why Microsoft has been ranking as the Leader over the last 14 years, especially after Power BI has been conceptualized.
Top 9 Advantages of Power BI
- Stunning Visualization tools
Power BI supports real-time reporting. One can effortlessly create in-depth and interactive visual analysis to create powerful dashboards for data storytelling and lead your business users to do data discovery. You can choose from both in-built visuals or community-created custom visualizations. All of these can be shared within the organization or exported depending on the user’s choice.
For example, look at a dashboard with Covid-19 insights below:
This Visualization uses colours, Bar Charts, Area Charts and Geographical maps to convey data in the most effective manner. Along with KPIs highlighting the most important parameters. A few of the Data Visualization tools and graphs supported by Power BI (but not limited to) include Scatter plots, Bubble charts, Area Chart, Line Chart, Bar charts, Column Chart, Combo Chart, Pie Chart, Donut Chart, Gauge charts, Funnel Chart, Waterfall Chart, Regional Maps, Point Maps, Flow Maps, Slicer Charts, TreeMaps, Matrix Charts and even Tables.
Ok, I’ll stop listing the charts. What I mean is Power BI offers a wide range of charts. But if you think there is something that is unavailable, just check Add-ons. Microsoft Power BI comes with Add-ons with community-created tools like Comicgen or Word Cloud etc. All that is left is for you to explore them.
- Robust Data Modelling with DAX
Why do we use Excel? The most common reason would be — the ease with which we can transform and model data to generate insights. Think of DAX, which stands for Data Analysis Expressions, as the modelling language for Power BI. For example Revenue calculation in Power BI for AdventureWorks report:
Similar to excel is it not? One key difference is that Excel formulas manipulate cells whereas Power BI DAX accesses Rows and columns to perform the calculations, similar to the Use as Table feature of excel.
But the similarity with excel makes Power BI very easy to shift to, and even perform complex calculations with ease.
- Data Integration
Power BI comes with multiple in-built connectors for you to help easily connect and join numerous on-premise, on-cloud, and even streaming data sources for data preparation and analysis.
With the capability to connect to native Microsoft integration with Cortana, Excel, and other Microsoft apps and services and external data sources such as JSON, SAP HANA, MySQL, Snowflake, Teradata, and many others, Power BI can help you retrieve data from the most used data sources for analysis. For a detailed understanding of the data sources, Power BI can connect with, read this document.
- Power of Microsoft
Power BI is built on Microsoft Azure Architecture, which removes the requirement of having a separate Data Management Platform. You can notice how Power BI data files are smaller than the Excel data files you load for large data. It also ensures that the loading and manipulation of data are faster whatever the size of data is.
By working along with Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, users can verbally ask questions to access graphs and charts. With Azure Machine Learning, Power BI users can access image recognition, text analytics, and create machine learning models.
- Natural Language search
Power BI has a natural language search interface that allows users to design visualizations using common English search words, with the Q&A Box. Look at the image below:
The Q&A Box along with the “Ask a Question about your data” dialogue box, give users a list of previews of data that they might want along with suggestions for related searches.
- Data Governance and Security
Power BI Report Server and Power BI Gateway are useful to connect, access, store and share data within secured networks. Report developers can set up Row-level security (RLS) access filters to ensure viewers can see data relevant to them only.
One can then securely share the insights with your team within your organization or even send them outside your organization over email. Security features in Power BI help to control the access to data in a granular way, so that data does not get misused.
Power BI Embedded offers APIs which are used to embed visuals into custom applications. It allows users to embed your Power BI content such as reports, dashboards, and tiles, in a web application or in a website. So instead of going to a different platform, integrate Power BI into your user flow to generate faster and actionable insights.
- Accessibility
You can view Power BI reports across multiple platforms and devices. Wherever you can access the internet, you’ll be able to access the report with the same. Power BI also gives users to integrate with advanced data analytics tools like R and Python to move beyond its normal capabilities.
- Saas & Pricing
Power BI comes with a structure of scalable and flexible SaaS offerings. The best part of using Power BI is that there is no usage license fee with installation and no configuration costs. Users need not worry about updates at regular intervals.
With its 4 offerings namely:
- Power BI Desktop App (Free)
- Power BI Pro
- Power BI Premium
- Power BI reporting server
As per your usage, with Power BI, you can easily upscale and downscale your investments as needs and requirements change. This really saves you time to benefit from your purchase. The free service is designed for individual users and offers just 1 gigabyte (GB) of storage along with daily refresh cycles. Enterprises will want to go with the Professional version, which has more data storage (10 GB), faster data fresh cycles (hourly), streaming data consumption (1 million rows per hour compared to the 10,000 rows per hour offered in the free tier), and collaboration features.
Final Thoughts:
Business Intelligence Solutions help organizations to find actionable insights from data by deep diving and drilling down the data. They help make operational, short-term, and long-term strategies. With three leaders in the market being Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik, it is imperative to have one of them for your organization.
With Power BI, not only visualizations but the power of Azure and Microsoft can be added to have a data management platform and long-term advantage. Last but not least finding the right implementation partner would be key in having a seamless integration.
By finding the right implementation partner like Polestar Solutions, you can improve your decision-making capabilities like many of our clients, streamline data reporting with personalized solutions, and meet your data analytics objectives. (P.S. Without compromising your time and budget)
