Microsoft is once again positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2022.

Once again,  Gartner names Microsoft the leader of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2022. This is the fourth consecutive year that Gartner has named Power BI the most complete and powerful platform in the market.

Gartner magic quadrant 2022

As it does every year in February, Gartner has published the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms (ABI). 

If you work in the technology sector, it is very likely that you are already familiar with Gartner's Magic Quadrant, the annual ranking published by one of the most important international technology consultancies.

However, let's take a brief look at what it does.

What is Gartner's Magic Quadrant?

Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a graphical square-shaped representation that ranks the leading technology providers (software, apps, platforms, tools, etc.) in the market. The report is the result of an extensive market research.

Gartner creates and publishes a magic quadrant for each sector of activity within the technology industry, with more than 100 categories of magic quadrants. Within the technology and business community, Gartner's Magic Quadrant is considered an authority and its results affect IT sourcing and sales for companies in the industry.

How does it work?

Gartner's Magic Quadrant classifies the best technology vendors in the market into 4 categories: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players and Challengers. The US consulting firm ranks companies based on two main criteria: their vision and their ability to execute.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) Platforms 2022

Gartner magic quadrant 2022The results of the latest Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2022 are clear: Microsoft is once again the undisputed market leader thanks to Power BI. 

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This year, Gartner highlights the ability of analytics and business intelligence tools to deliver automated insights so that the ideal consumer of the platforms is the data-driven decision maker rather than the analyst or data scientist: "Many platforms are adding capabilities for users to easily compose low-code or no-code automation workflows and applications. This blend of capabilities is helping to expand the vision for analytics beyond simply delivering datasets and presenting dashboards to delivering enriched contextualized insights, refocusing attention on decision-making processes, and ultimately taking actions that will deliver business value."

On the other hand, the 2022 ABI platform rankings are based on 12 critical capabilities, which have been updated from 2021 to reflect areas of vendor change and differentiation, with more emphasis on augmented analytics. The 12 capabilities are: 

Why Microsoft Power BI is a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2022

As we have already advanced, Microsoft is once again positioned as a leader in Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant. This is already the fourth year that Gartner has named Microsoft the market leader. Let's see why.

The main reason, obviously, is Power BI, of which Gartner highlights its ability to query and explore data visually, as well as interactive dashboards and augmented analytics: The new “goals” capability enables data-driven and collaborative tracking of key business metric dashboards. [...] In 2022, Microsoft’s vision is to make Power BI the hub for data and analytics in an organization.

Strengths

In terms of Power BI's strengths, Gartner notes:

  • Alignment with Office 365, Teams and Azure Synapse: "The inclusion of Power BI in the Office 365 E5 SKU has provided an enormous channel for the platform’s spread. As many customers turn to Teams for remote work collaboration, the ability to access Power BI and now “goals” within the same Teams interface is a compelling integration for business users. Power BI and Azure Synapse alignment addresses multiple data and analytics personas and use cases."
  • Price/value combination: According to the US consulting firm, Power BI does not sacrifice quality for a disruptively low pricing model. They also underline the value of Power BI's cloud service, "rich in its capabilities, which include an enlarged set of augmented analytics and automated machine learning (autoML) capabilities."
  • Power portfolio and product ambition: Gartner highlights Microsoft's business-centric approach, which provides a key environment with the joint use of Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate to drive business value. The consultancy also emphasises the high integration capabilities of these platforms: "Power Apps can be embedded in Power BI dashboards or access Power BI datasets, and Power Automate flows can be constructed to take various actions based on the data. AI-powered services, such as text, sentiment and image  analytics, are available within Power BI Premium."
Cautions

In terms of Power BI's cautions or weaknesses, Gartner mentions the offer of fewer capabilities in Power BI on-premise compared to the Power BI cloud service. They also negatively assess that Azure is the only deployment option. However, according to Gartner, Power BI's great handicap is its content publishing process and, especially, the lack of data governance: "Creating a process for promotion and publication of Power BI content can lead to a significant administrative overhead for customers. With a one-to-one relationship between published Power BI apps and Workspaces, organizations may be manually managing many hundreds of Workspaces — an issue Microsoft plans to address in its roadmap."

In this blog we have warned on numerous occasions that the possibilities for data governance in Power BI are limited. Gartner confirms this: "How to govern self-service usage is one of the most common questions asked about Power BI by users of Gartner’s inquiry service."

At Bismart we realise that controlling and managing data within the Power BI environment is a priority for any organisation. Data governance is closely linked to data quality. In this sense, if we are unable to organise our analytics and business intelligence environment, as well as the data in it, we will hardly be able to measure our activity and/or create dashboards and reports that provide value. 

That's why we have created our own data governance solution for Power BI: Power BI Viewer. Find out all the details below:

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As a Microsoft Power BI partner, we at Bismart are very pleased that Gartner confirms once again this year that Power BI is the best data analytics and BI platform on the market. This assures us that we develop our solutions with the most advanced technologies and that we offer the best capabilities to our customers. 

 

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Posted by Núria E