Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Workday Prism Analytics

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

In my organization, we mainly use Workday Prism Analytics in HR and Finance departments. It not only enables us to make data-centric decisions but also helps reduce the need for data experts since we are able to visualize data on our own through self-service analytics.

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

• It's web based. No need to install any desktop clients on your machine to use platfora.
• It's best suited for a big data Hadoop environment. I can rate it as the #1 BI tool for a big data hadoop environment.
• Platfora follows kind of the same architecture as Hadoop architecture like Master and Slave architecture. It scales with the data volumes.
• Querying data is very good and very fast. (Platfora Lens)
• Client presentation wise it's good. You can get different kinds of graphs.
• Platfora almost supports everything on Big Data technologies including file formats, compression etc.
• Security is not compromised and it can deal in parallel with any Hadoop distributor security implementations. Just take an example of Knox on Hortonworks, so it will deal with that and cloudera , MapR
• Its very easily understandable and for the new people who wants to try platfora, learning curve is low
• You can create your own datasets in platfora. You can store your results as a dataset in platfora and can share across

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

• Data Movement - Data needs to be moved from Hadoop to Platfora to create Platfora Lens and to do analytics.
• To support Data movement, infrastructure cost is high.
• To support data movement, network bandwidth consumption is high.
• No trial versions for companies to evaluate.

Incentivized

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.

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

Both are great products. The advantage of SAP Workforce Analytics is that it's widely interoperable between different APIs and databases. Having said that, Workday Prism Analytics scores much better in user-friendliness and the learning curve for the teams to start using it is very low. If Workday enhances its APIs functionality, it can compete easily with SAP Workforce Analytics.

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

• Improved ROI by decreasing the necessary time investment that managers must make to upkeep employee data sectors.
• Improved ease of access for employees, reducing unnecessary communication between employees and management.
• Has led to fewer accounting errors overall.

Incentivized