Google Cloud AI provides modern machine learning services, with pre-trained models and a service to generate tailored models.
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
Google Cloud AI is a wonderful product for companies that are looking to offset AI and ML processing power to cloud APIs, and specific Machine Learning use cases to APIs as well. For companies that are looking for very specific, customized ML capabilities that require lots of fine-tuning, it may be better to do this sort of processing through open-source libraries locally, to offset the costs that your company might incur through this API usage.
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Some of the build in/supported AI modules that can be deployed, for example Tensorflow, do not have up-to-date documentation so what is actually implemented in the latest rev is not what is mentioned in the documentation, resulting in a lot of debugging time.
Customization of existing modules and libraries is harder and it does need time and experience to learn.
Google Cloud AI can do a better job in providing better support for Python and other coding languages.
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
We are extremely satisfied with the impact that this tool has made on our organization since we have practically moved from crawling to walking in the process of generating information for our main task to investigate in the field through interviews. With the audio to text translation tool there is a difference from heaven to earth in the time of feeding our internal data.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
So far we have not had any problems with the application, it is extremely easy to use and it is also easy to install. It does not require much training since the instruction is quite clear for its execution and application in the procedures of the company. The team in charge of this application is very pleased to work with this app.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
Every rep has been nice and helpful whenever I call for help. One of the systems froze and wouldn't start back up and with the help of our assigned rep we got everything back up in a timely manner. This helped us not lose customers and money.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
In fact, you only need the basic tech knowledge to do a Google search. You need to know if your organization requires it or not,. our organization required it. And that is why we acquired it and solved a need that we had been suffering from. This is part of the modernization of an organization and part of its growth as a company.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
These are basic tools although useful, you can't simply ignore them or say they are not good. These tools also have their own values. But, Yes, Google is an advanced one, A king in the field of offering a wide range of tools, quality, speed, easy to use, automation, prebuild, and cost-effective make them a leader and differentiate them from others.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
Artificial intelligence and automation seems 'free' and draws the organization in, without seeming to spend a lot of funds. A positive impact, but who is actually tracking the cost?
We want our employees to use it, but many resist technology or are scared of it, so we need a way to make them feel more comfortable with the AI.
The ROI seems positive since we are full in with Google, and the tools come along with the functionality.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
