Synergies is a cognitive application service provider that combines business knowledge, artificial intelligence technology, and software development. Their mission is to help businesses through their digital transformation journey, become leaders and innovators in their industries by unlocking the power of data in the hands of business users and decision makers. Their product, JarviX, is an AnalyticOps Platform . JarviX uses NLP…
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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.
JarviX is very good at data integration, creating charts and reports for data visualization. It is really impressive that Jarvix can let our marketing team know the number of members living in a specific area in seconds. In addition, the product manager from Synergies is willing to help us with all problems we encounter. I accidentally changed one of the settings in a data table which threw the existing dashboard into chaos. However, after assistance from the product manager, we were able to successfully bring the data back to normal.
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.
There should be more flexibility in changing the data tables uploaded into JarviX. For example, it should enable users to edit the syntax of the table or change the data format of the columns without affecting the existing dashboard and charts already created using that data table.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tableau and Power BI. Obviously, they are not in the same category. Tableau and Power BI only provide data visualizations plus a little bit of analytics. JarviX not only provides data exploration, so you can find out what the problem is, as well as model management and App builder. If you only look for a dashboard, yes BI is probably enough, but if you constantly feel lacking actionable insights for actual implementations of improvements, JarviX is the choice for you.
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.
I think the best part of JarviX is that we can get the analysis results in several minutes. We spent lots of time making reports and managing our data in the past. All in all, it helps us save the time, cost, and labor of managing data.
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.
