Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft was incredibly smart and deliberate about how to market this tool. You sign up, get a free trial, and you have a working dashboard within 10 minutes. After that, you pay $10 /user /month. Why wouldn’t you use this, given the low cost and ease of starting? (not to mention, their desktop tool is completely free)

Power BI

I’ve seen many clients with a growing Power BI deployment, sometimes consciously, but sometimes before a data strategy is even in place. It’s just so easy and cost-effective that Power BI often becomes the de-facto tool at an organization solely because their current analytics tools (or Excel) just wasn’t working for them.

Power BI is an awesome dashboard tool, and Microsoft has the ecosystem to support just about every reporting scenario, from standard reports (SSRS) to tabular in-memory models (SSAS) to Excel-driven analysis and discovery within Power BI dashboards. It works, and it works well, assuming you’re bought into the Microsoft ecosystem.

That’s the gotcha, but also the reason why you would select Power BI (or ultimately, Microsoft) as your analytics platform. You absolutely need to be willing to go all-in with Microsoft, because there’s more you need to do to make Power BI an effective choice. Mixing and matches tools from other vendors will be a difficult-to-maintain environment, and much more costly.

You need to be aware that the $10 price tag for Power BI is only a small part of the equation. You’re going to need a semantic layer within Analysis Services for performance and governance — doing this will avoid creating 100 versions of the same data model. You also may need formatted reporting capabilities found in Reporting Services, understanding that there is still a gap in Microsoft’s execution. SSRS only works in on-premise deployments. Yes, you can embed them into Power BI, but you need to buy into a hybrid deployment model to make this work (for now).

At this point, now that you’ve decided to go all-in with Microsoft, you’re likely going to want to take advantage of Azure’s PaaS services. Don’t worry — they’re awesome, and you will love them if you’re a Microsoft shop. As you scale, the Power BI Premium offering will remove the per-seat licensing cost for view-only users, giving insight to the entire organization without the high price tag.

You may need to accept a multi-cloud or hybrid deployment model. Make sure your database is fully supported within Power BI. If you’re not running on a Microsoft SQL Server database or not using SSAS, you may run into some issues. There’s absolutely no good reason to spend money on a powerful analytics database, only to find out Power BI either uses ODBC and/or requires the data to be imported into Power BI before using it.

Microsoft is adding new features and improved connectivity to new databases and applications on a monthly basis. It may be only a matter of time before it becomes the default choice for reporting no matter where your data lives.

Summary: Power BI is your gateway drug into Microsoft’s ecosystem. Be willing to go all-in to reap the benefits. Budget wisely and plan for both the Microsoft services fees and implementation costs. Consider Power BI Premium for larger implementations.