Microsoft Power BI, Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2023

Gartner has just published a new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms. For the 16th consecutive year, Microsoft is positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2023 for Analytic and Business Intelligence (ABI) thanks to Power BI.

Microsoft Power BI is once again positioned as the leading platform in Gartner's new Magic Quadrant for Analytic and Business Intelligence (ABI) Platforms.

Overall, Gartner names Power BI the best analytic and BI platform on the market for its integration and cohesive vision with Microsoft 365, Teams, and Azure Synapse; for its breadth of capabilities; and for its unique competitive price/performance value. 

The reasons why Microsoft Power BI is a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Analytic and BI (ABI) Platforms 2023

As we have already mentioned, Microsoft leads the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms (ABI) thanks to the unique capabilities of Power BI. 

This year, Gartner positively highlights Power BI's large market reach and breadth of capabilities thanks to its integration with the other platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem: Microsoft 365, Azure, and Teams. On the other hand, Gartner positions Microsoft as a leader for its "flexible pricing, well-above-average functionality, and an ambitious product roadmap."

Strengths

In terms of Microsoft Power BI's strengths, Gartner highlights:

• Alignment with Microsoft 365, Teams, and Azure Synapse: The inclusion of Power BI in Microsoft 365 E5 has been a huge channel for spreading the platform. With many customers turning to Teams for remote work collaboration, the ability to access Power BI and now Goals within the same Teams interface is a compelling integration for business users. The alignment of Power BI and Azure Synapse addresses multiple personas and D&A use cases.
• Price/value combination: Power BI service now has a per-user offering to appeal to smaller organizations with 300 employees or less. Larger organizations can still opt for the per-capacity option, which tends to be more profitable with more users. Microsoft does not use a cross-selling strategy to increase revenue per customer, as most ABI platform vendors do.
• Power portfolio and product ambition: Microsoft has a clear vision of cross-utilization of Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate to drive business value. Power Apps can be integrated into Power BI dashboards or access Power BI data sets. Power Automate flows can be built to take various actions based on the data. AI-based services, such as text, sentiment, and image analysis, are available in Power BI Premium.

Cautions

Regarding Power BI's weakest points, Gartner mentions the following:

• Governance of content creation and publishing: Gartner increasingly receives inquiries from Power BI customers struggling to govern the process of creating and publishing analytics content. Customers express concern about the multiple ways of performing most tasks, such as data modeling or content promotion. For example, data modeling tasks can be performed with datasets, data marts, data streams, and Dataverse. Because of its low cost and easy configuration, Power BI deployments tend to proliferate, and standard governance practices are difficult to implement.
• Open architecture and limited headless: While most customers of Power BI services appreciate the tight integration of Microsoft's architecture, there is a growing demand for greater interoperability between competing BI platforms. In particular, as an analytics catalog and metrics warehouse, many Power BI customers would like to see more open integration with competing products.
• Azure as the only deployment option: Microsoft does not give customers the flexibility to choose a cloud IaaS offering. While data connectivity enables multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios, its Power BI service only runs on Azure. However, customers using Azure can take advantage of the global reach and multi-geographic capabilities offered by Microsoft's cloud platform.

As a Microsoft Partner since our foundation, at Info Business Solutions we are very pleased that Gartner confirms once again that we work with the best integration tools and ecosystems on the market. This confirmation allows us to ensure that we develop our business solutions with the latest technology and that we are offering the best capabilities and guarantees in the market to our customers.