Power to the top with Power BI
December 11, 2017
Power to the top with Power BI
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is our primary visualization tool for dashboards, scorecards, ad-hoc reports, and self-service. The power of Power BI stems from the implementation of a strong foundation in the form of an enterprise data warehouse. While we introduced Power BI, the data warehouse has been implemented in small chunks, therefore, while the goal is for Power BI to be used across the organization, currently, it is used by a subset of staff. The primary purpose of having Power BI is to allow staff to self-serve and get information at a glance without needing to use a complicated tool or relying on IT /technical resources to generate extracts.
- Easy to use, intuitive
- Inexpensive licencing
- Option to deploy to cloud or on-premise
- Variety of visualizations
- Ability to deploy on top of any data source
- Heavy use of DAX as a programming language for measures/KPIs
- Confusion around the variety of products that serve same/similar purpose from Microsoft
- No ability to create a portal with Power BI
- Tableau, Qlik and SAS
The primary reason why we selected Power BI is cost. Most enterprises have some sort of Microsoft or SQL Server licensing in place. Adding Power BI and the Microsoft infrastructure is a low-cost barrier to an existing license. Most other products came at a much higher price point. However, when looked at the feature sets, each technology has its pros and cons. We decided to pit the cost vs feature sets and found Power BI to be most favorable for us.