Hashboard (discontinued) vs. IBM Analytics Engine vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Glean.io is exceptionally well for creating automation data visualisation dashboards. Exploring the data is again highly effective. Visualisations are easily customisable to best suit the requirements of the team. Collaborating and commenting around the dashboards is very smooth. If there are any changes in the system or any feature requests, the support team takes some time to respond

Incentivized

• Well suited for my big data related project or a static data set analysis especially for uploading huge dataset to the cluster.
• But had some issues with connecting IoT real-time data and feeding to Power BI. It might be my understanding please take it as a mere comment rather than a suggestion.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• Workflow is easy and clear due to clean and state of the art interface
• Model creation is easy
• Possibility for custom SQL code for database connection is very helpful

Incentivized

• Jobs with Spark, Hadoop, or Hive queries are rapidly attained
• Can collect, organize and analyze your data accurately
• You can customize, for example, Spark or Hadoop configuration settings, or Python, R, Scala, or Java libraries.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Querying has to be done by users only. There can be ways to automate querying using templates
• Not able to clearly check the query run time
• The customer support team can be little more proactive while communicating any changes and resolving any queries

Incentivized

• Easier pricing and plug-and-play like you see with AWS and Azure, it would be nice from a budgeting and billing standpoint, as well as better support for the administration.
• Bundling of the Cloud Object Storage should be included with the Analytics Engine.
• The inability to add your own Hadoop stack components has made some transfers a little more complex.

Incentivized

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

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.

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.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

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.

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

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.

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.

For simple use cases, Glean.io is a lightweight alternative to SAP Analytics Cloud. Provisioning, testing, and documentation are easier and less intimidating in the Glean.io case. Thus, it is easy to explore without firing up the sales machinery of the big corporates. Thus, the process of looking into and testing it out was way more convenient. Further, the data ops features were new to use and seem to be unique with Glean.io.

Incentivized

We initially wanted to go with Google BigQuery, mainly for the name recognition. However, the pricing and support structure led us to seek alternatives, which pointed us to IBM. Apache Spark was also in the running, but here IBM's domination in the industry made the choice a no-brainer. As previously stated, the support received was not quite what we expected, but was adequate.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Optimised the DB management team by 30%
• Reduce in data visualisation dashboards TAT by 50%
• Increase in revenues and savings by 20%

Incentivized

• This product has allowed us to gather analytics data across multiple platforms so we can view and analyze the data from different workflows, all in one place.
• IBM Analytics has allowed us to scale on demand which allows us to capture more and more data, thus increasing our ROI.
• The convenience of the ability to access and administer the product via multiple interfaces has allowed our administrators to ensure that the application is making a positive ROI for our business users and partners.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized