Power BI Training in Mumbai

The Top Reasons You Should Be Considering Power BI

Strap yourself in – here are reasons you and your company should be considering Power BI as a self service and/or enterprise BI solution.

It’s Microsoft (the new Microsoft)

• No one can deny the strength of Microsoft in the corporate world of business software and IT solutions.
• Microsoft hasn’t always been great at listening to specific customer concerns, but it has always been great at building and delivering world class robust commercial software.  Power BI is part of that heritage but better, for all the reasons I cover in this article.

 Power BI is built from the ground up on SSAS heritage

• Power BI is a green field product but it has an enormous heritage.  Microsoft has been one of the most successful companies out there in the BI space leading with SQL Server Analysis Services Multi Dimensional and to a lesser extent with Microsoft Excel.
• When it came time to leverage the new Column Store database technologies to build Power BI, Microsoft called on its crack expert SSAS team to build the DAX engine (Vertipaq) for Power BI from scratch leveraging the skills, knowledge and experience of a pedigree race horse.  It is unlikely that a stand alone company could start from scratch like Microsoft has and hit a home run first batter up.

Power BI is built from the ground up on SSIS heritage

• Just as Vertipaq has been built from scratch using new technologies but with a pedigree, Power Query (the self service ETL tool – Extract, Transform and Load) has also been built from scratch.
• But once again Microsoft has wheeled in its crack SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) team that has a long and successful heritage of successful ETL software development.  D
• not under estimate the benefits of getting this part of the puzzle right the first time, and Microsoft has already proven it is winning in this space.

Power BI will ingest data from virtually any source

• Most of the major data providers are already built and deployed in production.
• There is also a “catch-all” ODBC database connector and there are new (less main stream) connectors being developed all the time.  In addition there are many cloud based connectors that allow users to easily connect to cloud content like Google Analytics, SalesForce.com, and lots more online software service providers.

 Power BI is highly compressed and performant

• Vertipaq (the data modelling engine in Power BI and Excel) is a highly compressed and performant columnar database. 
• It uses modern tabular database technologies (built from scratch) to create a highly compressed database that loads fully into memory for rapid performance. 
• It is not unusual for a database to compress between 600% –1200%, meaning a 1GB database will compress down to an operating size of between 85MB – 170MB. 
• The performance impact of this compression is amazing and it needs to be experienced to be believed.

Power BI has a brand new visualisation engine

• There is no baggage to take along for the ride here – no sign of Silverlight for example.  Microsoft has built a brand new HTML 5 compliant visualisation engine that is simply awesome.  Everything (virtually everything) will slice and dice and cross filter everything else (as shown below).

• If you can see a map of your country showing sales by region, then click on the region to see the underlying details.  If you can see a bar chart that show performance by year, then drill down on the bar chart to see the monthly, weekly or daily breakdown. Everything is intuitive and simply works.
• Gone are the days when you needed a specialised IT report writer to create every new report for the business.  Anyone that can create a chart in Excel can create a chart in Power BI (and probably some people that can’t create a chart in Excel too for that matter).  Unfortunately for professional report writers, I simply don’t see this role existing in the future as it will be the business users that build what they need.

Power BI also has open source visualisations

• Microsoft has realised early on (under that strong leadership mentioned earlier) that it can’t solve world peace on its own. 
• Microsoft has be focused with its efforts so rather than try to solve every visualisation problem for every company around the world, it decided to share its visualisation source code so that any capable developer can develop their own visualisations and share them with the community.
•  Developers can either copy an existing visual and extend it, or they can start from scratch and build something completely new.  It is amazing the quality of what has been delivered already and the party hasn’t even started yet. 

Power BI is built for users familiar with Excel, but it’s not Excel

• This is self service BI at its best. 
• Who else can design the UI for the business user community better than the company that built and owns Excel? So while it is relatively easy for Excel users to get started, it is not Excel. 
• Microsoft has brought the rigour and structure from SQL Server Analysis Services into this product to ensure that it is a Self Service BI Tool with Enterprise strength features, including row level security, active directory integration etc while it is still familiar enough to Excel users that they can and will embrace it. 
• We can hear a few companies cringing at this point as they think about the BI shelfware they have spent literally million$ on and is not being used.

Power BI is in the cloud…

• Like it or not, the world is moving to the cloud. 
• This product was built from the ground up with the view of sharing via the cloud. 
• It uses all the modern HTML5 coding techniques to ensure compatibility with browsers across any platform.  It has industrial strength security wrapped around the cloud presence and it is definitely secure – Microsoft’s reputation is on the line here. 

 We realise it won’t work for every company, but frankly it will work for most.  Of course do your due diligence, but then get on board.

Unless it’s not in the cloud

• Not every company is ready to move to the cloud for whatever reason.
• Microsoft has released an on premise version of Power BI called Power BI Report Servermeaning companies can keep there data on premise if needed. 
• In addition, the desktop version of the software is free for everyone and is at least as good (if not better) than Excel for BI analytics. 
• You can build and share pbix files just like you can share xlsx files to any other user that has the desktop application.  And it is possible to install 64 Bit Desktop even if you are locked into 32 bit Office