Enhanced Analytics

Microsoft is one of a handful of major players in enterprise BI and analytics. The company’s flagship platform, Power BI, is cloud-based and delivered on the Azure Cloud. On-prem capabilities also exist for individual users or when power users are authoring complex data mashups using in-house data sources. Power BI is unique because it enables users to do data preparation, data discovery, and dashboards with the same design tool. The platform integrates with Excel and Office 365 and has a very active user community that extends the tool’s capabilities.

Power BI

Power BI offers users the ability to create, share and edit personalized reports and dashboards. Users can also choose to import them along with datasets. A variety of charts, maps and other images can be integrated into these reports and dashboards.

Power BI features include:

Simple out-of-the-box dashboards for Salesforce, Google Analytics, Dynamics & more

Access to data from Excel, cloud services, streaming data, databases, etc.

Real-time, personalized reports & dashboards

Collaboration with Power BI Groups

Compatibility & Integration

Power BI integrates well with Alteryx, as well as other Microsoft solutions including Sharepoint and Excel.

Import data from multiple sources

Transform data from spreadsheets, CSV files, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server databases, or web

Perform quick calculations on datasets of any size

Data blending and advanced data analytics with Alteryx

Predictive, statistical, and spatial analytics with Alteryx

Mobile Access

Power BI offers native Windows, iOS, and Android apps for free download.

View personalized dashboards and reports

Stay up to date with data-driven alerts

Scan QR codes

Create, annotate, and share tiles

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop improves visual analytics with intuitive report authoring. Drag and drop allows users to place content on a flexible canvas. Discover patterns and explore a unified view of linked, interactive visualizations.

Key features:

Data shaping and modelling

Transform and clean data

End-to-end analytics solution

Publish and share interactive reports easily

Interactive data visualization is further enhanced through Excel tools Power View and Power Map. Power View allows users to create charts and other visualizations from Excel files in order to explore and present insights. Power Map is a 3D visualization tool that offers the ability to plot geographic and temporal data on a customized globe or map.

Further Information: Power BI

offers a broad spectrum of BI and analytics tools, which is headlined by the company’s flagship offering, Qlik Sense. The solution enables organizations to combine all their data sources into a single view. The Qlik Analytics Platform allows users to develop, extend and embed visual analytics in existing applications and portals. Embedded functionality is done within a common governance and security framework. Users can build and embed Qlik as simple mashups or integrate within applications, information services or IoT platforms. Qlik has added a slew of augmented analytics features in the last calendar year.

offers an expansive visual BI and analytics platform, and is widely regarded as the major player in the marketplace. The company’s analytic software portfolio is available through three main channels: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, and Tableau Online. Tableau connects to hundreds of data sources and is available on-prem or in the cloud. The vendor also offers embedded analytics capabilities, and users can visualize and share data with Tableau Public.

Microsoft is one of a handful of major players in enterprise BI and analytics. The company’s flagship platform, Power BI, is cloud-based and delivered on the Azure Cloud. On-prem capabilities also exist for individual users or when power users are authoring complex data mashups using in-house data sources. Power BI is unique because it enables users to do data preparation, data discovery, and dashboards with the same design tool. The platform integrates with Excel and Office 365, and has a very active user community that extends the tool’s capabilities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers business intelligence functionality through its cloud-native and serverless BI service called Amazon QuickSight. QuickSight is embeddable and features built-in machine learning as well. The product lets you create and publish interactive BI dashboards that can be queried using natural language. It can automatically scale to thousands of users without any infrastructure, and touts pay-per-session pricing so customers only pay when users access dashboards or reports.

IBM offers an expansive range of BI and analytic capabilities under two distinct product lines. The Cognos Analytics platform is an integrated self-service solution that allows users to access data to create dashboards and reports. IBM Watson Analytics offers a machine learning-enabled user experience that includes automated pattern detection, support for natural language query and generation, and embedded advanced analytics capabilities. Cognos is IBM’s ‘flagship’ BI and analytics tool, where Watson is the vendor’s entry into the emerging AI-powered tools arena.