![\"gartner\"](\"https:\/\/newdatalabs.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/gartner.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe new Gartner Report, or the continuation of the Oscar duel between David and Goliath
\nThe next edition of Gartner\u2019s \u201cMagic Quadrant\u201d for Business Intelligence solutions has been released. With little change from last year, Gartner still maintains that there are three leaders in the Business Intelligence solutions market \u2013 Microsoft, Tableau and Qlik. Except that, according to Gartner, Microsoft is leading slightly \u201cmore\u201d this year than a year ago. Most of the report’s readers will come to such conclusions “at first glance”. <\/p>\n
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There are, however, a few “buts”: <\/p>\n
1. Remember that Gartner does not evaluate TOOLS, but SUPPLIERS. It\u2019s a bit like the Oscars would not go to movies and their creators, but to movie studios. It changes your perspective a lot. Since the two evaluation criteria in the \u201cmagic square\u201d are \u201cCompleteness of vision\u201d and \u201cAbility to execute\u201d, it is obvious that Microsoft \u2013 one of the largest corporations in the world, having in its portfolio a multitude of IT tools, having its own \u201cecosystem\u201d, from Windows, through Office, MS SQL Server, a web browser, the Power Bi tool, to … Xbox (and on top of that huge financial resources, a huge network of Partners, etc.) \u2013 will get very high marks in such a ranking. <\/p>\n
2. From this point of view, we are comparing David with Goliath \u2013 a company specializing in Business Intelligence solutions, for which it is the basis and sense of existence (Tableau) with a larger corporation, for which Business Intelligence is just one of many markets on which it operates, a bit of a \u201ccheck \u2013 box\u201d in its offer. <\/p>\n
3. Choosing between these vendors, therefore, means choosing between a standalone, comprehensive and mature BI platform that can be managed in any way (on premise, any cloud, private cloud) such as Tableau, and a developing component of a large \u201cecosystem\u201d that only works within that ecosystem, which is Power BI. In the reality of a large company, the decision to use Power Bi is in fact a decision to enter the entire Microsoft \u201ccloud\u201d infrastructure \u2013 as we observe with our customers, a decision not always taken fully consciously. 3. In other words, to paraphrase a slogan from one of the forgotten advertising campaigns \u2013 Tableau can confidently say \u201cwe try harder\u201d. <\/p>\n
4. What is interesting about the report is its characterization of individual providers, which 99% of its readers do not read. I will quote the Microsoft and Tableau descriptions in full. <\/p>\n
Microsoft<\/strong> <\/p>\n Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It has massive market reach through Microsoft Office and a comprehensive and\u00a0visionary\u00a0product roadmap. <\/p>\n Microsoft offers data preparation, visual-based data discovery, interactive dashboards and augmented analytics in Power BI. This is available as a SaaS option running in the Azure cloud or as an on-premises option in Power BI Report Server. Power BI Desktop can be used as a stand-alone, free personal analysis tool. Installation of Power BI Desktop is required when power users are authoring complex data mashups involving on-premises data sources. Microsoft releases a weekly update to its cloud-based Power BI service, which gained hundreds of features in 2020. Notable additions include more augmented analytics in the form of AI-infused experiences, including smart narratives (NLG) and anomaly detection capabilities for out-of-the-box visuals. Strengths <\/p>\n \u2022 Alignment with Office 365 and Teams:<\/strong>\u00a0The inclusion of Power BI in the Office 365 E5 SKU has provided an enormous channel for the platform\u2019s spread, making it \u201cself-seeding\u201d in many organizations. The increasing integration of Power BI into Microsoft Teams, with its tens of millions of daily active users, will further increase Power BI\u2019s reach in the world of remote working. Power BI is now often the option that organizations have in mind when using Gartner\u2019s client inquiry service to ask about ABI platform selection \u2014 \u201cwhy not Power BI?\u201d is effectively the question most are asking. <\/p>\n \u2022 Price\/power combination:<\/strong>\u00a0The influence of Power BI has drastically reduced the price of tools in the ABI platform market since its launch. In this case, though, low price does not equate to limited functionality. The Power BI cloud service is extremely rich in its capabilities, which include an enlarged set of augmented analytics and automated ML capabilities. AI-powered services, such as text, sentiment and image analytics, are available within Power BI Premium and draw on Azure capabilities. <\/p>\n \u2022 Scope of product ambition:\u00a0<\/strong>Microsoft continues to invest in a broad set of\u00a0visionary\u00a0capabilities and to integrate them with Power BI. It now claims to have 80,000 customers using AI services in Power BI deployments. It continues to encourage usage at scale by, for example, applying ML-driven automatic optimization of materialized views on Azure Synapse (and soon other data sources, including Snowflake and Redshift) to autotune query performance. <\/p>\n Cautions <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2022 Functional gaps in on-premises version:<\/strong>\u00a0Compared with the Power BI cloud service, Microsoft\u2019s on-premises offering has significant functional gaps, including in relation to dashboards, streaming analytics, prebuilt content, natural language question and answer, augmentation (what Microsoft calls Quick Insights) and alerting.\u00a0None of these functions are supported in Power BI Report Server, its on-premises offering. <\/p>\n \u2022 Azure only:<\/strong>\u00a0Microsoft does not give customers the flexibility to choose a cloud IaaS offering. Its Power BI service runs only in Azure. However, customers that utilize Azure can take advantage of the global reach offered by Microsoft\u2019s cloud platform. Power BI Premium enables customers to enable multigeography capabilities in their Power BI tenant, and they can deploy their capacity to one of 42 globally available data centers. <\/p>\n \u2022 Content promotion and publication process:<\/strong>\u00a0The way in which Power BI handles the promotion and publication of content can lead to a significant administrative overhead for customers. The fact that there is a one-to-one relationship between published Power BI apps and Workspaces (Power BI\u2019s collaborative \u201cdevelopment\u201d environment) means that organizations may face a situation in which they are manually managing many hundreds of Workspaces. Retroactively fixing this issue is a complex task. How to govern self-service usage is perhaps the most common question asked about Power BI by users of Gartner\u2019s inquiry service. The Power BI team is, however, investing in governance capabilities to help customers manage their Power BI environments better. Tableau is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a visual-based exploration experience that enables business users to access, prepare, analyze and present findings in their data. It has powerful marketing and expanded enterprise product capabilities, but the integration of Salesforce Einstein Analytics, now renamed Tableau CRM, remains a work in progress. <\/p>\n In 2020, Tableau enhanced its data preparation and data management capabilities. For data preparation, it released enhanced data modeling capabilities, which make it easier to analyze data across multiple tables at different levels of detail by building relationships between tables with a simple in-browser visual experience. For data management, Tableau Prep Conductor and Tableau Catalog offer a cohesive experience for operating and automating data management and understanding data lineage. An Einstein Discovery dashboard extension, the first integrated product to bring the predictive modeling capabilities of Salesforce Einstein Analytics to the Tableau platform, is scheduled for release in March 2021. <\/p>\n Strengths<\/strong> <\/p>\n \u2022 Analytics user experience:\u00a0<\/strong>Although Tableau keeps adding new capabilities, it always maintains a sleek experience for users, so they can perform analysis seamlessly. Although visual-based exploration is highly commoditized in today\u2019s market, Tableau can still differentiate itself by offering an intuitive analytics experience with richer capabilities based on its patented VizQL engine. <\/p>\n \u2022 Customer enthusiasm:<\/strong>\u00a0Many customers demonstrate a fanlike attitude toward Tableau, as evidenced by the more than 145,000 people who attended its 2020 online user conference. Tableau Public, a free platform on which to publicly share and explore data visualizations online, has over 3 million interactive visualizations. A user-experience-focused design means that, particularly for users in analyst roles, Tableau\u2019s offering is compelling and even enjoyable to use. <\/p>\n \u2022 Salesforce opportunity:<\/strong>\u00a0The Tableau Viz Lightning web component offers a low-code experience to simplify the task of integrating Tableau visualizations into Salesforce. Work.com, Salesforce\u2019s cloud offering to help organizations reopen workplaces safely and efficiently, uses the Tableau Viz Lightning web component to add a global COVID-19 tracker dashboard to the Workplace Command Center. The deeper integration of the MuleSoft data connector capabilities and a newly acquired Slack collaboration tool means that Salesforce clients have\u00a0a strengthening set of reasons\u00a0to consider Tableau. <\/p>\n Cautions <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2022 Not cloud-native:<\/strong>\u00a0Tableau offers cloud-hosted solutions (Tableau Online and Tableau CRM), but the company\u2019s heritage is in on-premises deployments, for which it has a massive installed base. Tableau does not have a cloud-native architecture for on-premises customers to embrace the cloud\u2019s full benefits. Deployment of Tableau Server in a containerized infrastructure is not currently supported (but is planned for 2021). As such, beyond Tableau Online, it cannot utilize the cloud\u2019s elasticity to automatically scale out in order to handle dynamic workloads. <\/p>\n \u2022 Premium pricing:<\/strong>\u00a0Tableau\u2019s pricing is an issue raised by users of Gartner\u2019s client inquiry service. Compared with some of the cloud vendors in this market, Tableau is expensive. The addition of Tableau CRM for a list price of up to $150 per user per month may well increase the concern of customers who are considering scaling their deployments or acquiring new functions. <\/p>\n \u2022 Integration challenges:<\/strong>\u00a0As is to be expected, the integration of Salesforce\u2019s ABI capabilities with those of Tableau is taking time. Currently, users face a fragmented experience if they want to take advantage of the augmented analytics functions of the former Einstein Analytics while using the Tableau platform. Einstein Analytics\u2019 strengths in automated data stories, key driver analysis, custom automation and explainable AI are not yet integrated into the Tableau user experience. <\/p>\n To sum up \u2013 looking from the perspective of not Vendors, but Tools \u2013 we are comparing the offer of the developing, but still more modest functional component of a large and complex, cloud \u201cecosystem\u201d, which is MS Power BI with beloved by Users, efficient, mature and easy-to-use tool, which is Tableau. The costs of both tools are comparable. The choice \u2013 as always \u2013 is yours. <\/p>\n Read more about both tools at https:\/\/comparebitools.com\/ .<\/p>\n The text expresses the author\u2019s personal views.<\/p>\n Witold Kilija\u0144ski The new Gartner Report, or the continuation of the Oscar duel between David and Goliath The next edition of Gartner\u2019s \u201cMagic Quadrant\u201d for Business Intelligence solutions has been released. With little change from last year, Gartner still maintains that there are three leaders in the Business Intelligence solutions market \u2013 Microsoft, Tableau and Qlik. Except […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"content-sidebar","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blog","8":"category-tableau","9":"entry"},"yoast_head":"\n
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\nTableau <\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Gartner\"](\"https:\/\/newdatalabs.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Gart-2007-2021.gif\")
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\nNDLS sp. z o.o.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"