10 Reasons why Microsoft seemingly surpassed Tableau in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant.
w.r.t the 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics & BI Platforms.
On 11th February, Gartner released the 2019 magic quadrant for Analytics & Business Intelligence platforms. In it, Gartner evaluates the strengths & weaknesses of 21 providers that it considers most significant in the marketplace and provides readers with a graph plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.
For the past 2 years, Microsoft and Tableau have been the quadrant leaders, and have had fairly close evaluations. This year, Microsoft does seem like it has surpassed Tableau in the leaders’ quadrant. Let’s see the reasons why it might be so…
- Full Microsoft stack not just Power BI.
Gartner is comparing the whole Microsoft suite of products (including all of their cloud offerings) against Tableau’s data visualization platform.
Gartner takes into account the whole Microsoft stack, not just Power BI. Microsoft is “Selling an ecosystem”, not just Power BI.
Microsofts ecosystem for BI is very good but the core Power BI’s visualization capabilities aren’t great compared to Tableau. It’s dashboard design models looks and feel a little antiquated, with a need for many complex add-on’s.
2. Cost:
License cost was the 2nd most important reason for reference customers to choose Microsoft Power BI. If your company is a Microsoft shop with azure subscription implementing PBI as an enterprise BI tool would be the path of least resistance.
Customers moving away from Tableau due to the license costs. Tableau introduced a new, lower-priced viewer license to compete against Microsoft, but it is only available with a subscription license.
3. Pervasive AI using Power BI: (Microsoft’s tag line)
Microsoft’s advancements in AI are being integrated into their BI stack for generic use, for both citizen data scientists and business analysts.
Power BI’s automated capabilities with AI-infused experiences such as natural language, quick insights, image recognition, text analytics, and key driver analysis are new and has Tableau left behind. They are leveraging the innovation from Microsoft Research with heavy investments into these integrations and constant updates.
4. Rapid Innovation:
Frequent updates: Microsoft has been releasing monthly updates for the last 12 months. For each of the below categories —
Reporting,
Modeling,
Analytics,
Data connectivity,
Data preparation,
Power BI service,
Power BI mobile,
Power BI embedded.
5. Investment in powerful analytic capabilities:
Microsoft is investing in a broad set of visionary capabilities and integrating them with Power BI. Some examples include:
Enhancements to augmented analytics
New AutoML features available in Azure Machine Learning
New Azure cognitive services.
6. Easy to use:
Customers gave Microsoft top-third ratings across all aspects for ease of use, cause who doesn’t love Microsoft Excel?
7. Strong momentum:
Strong uptake and global adoption — cause of low cost of entry.
At the moment, Microsoft claims to have 850k+ active community members, 215 independent Power BI user groups worldwide. That’s a high adoption rate, in the short 4year product life.
8. Tableau product gaps:
Support for querying multiple fact tables and complex schemas in a single data source is absent from Tableau’s product.
Does not support scheduled, bursted reports in a variety of output formats such as PDF. (It does now with the release of Conductor, March 2019)
Notable Tableau updates for this summer —
Monthly updates for Data Prep
PowerPoint plug-ins
Impact analysis
Fuzzy matching
Subscribe feature
pdf’s as attachments
Row level secuirty to over a 1000 people.
AI & ML:
Tableau started collaborations with DataRobot, Aible and AWS Sage maker to kick off their artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts with their product.
9. Bundled with Office 365:
In addition to selling Power BI subscriptions on a standalone basis, Microsoft bundles the relatively cheap Pro version of the product with the E5 version of Office 365, which goes for $35/user/month.
Power BI requires a premium for on-premise. On-premise report server is significantly different than Power BI service.
Power BI requires other features and components to make it worked as advertised, which sucks the user into the Microsoft eco-system.
Power BI does not work on OSX:
Requires setting up a virtual system or dual booting.
10. Support:
Quality of Tableau’s product support declined in 2018. Customers place Tableau in the bottom third of vendors, due partly to more difficult upgrades.
12% of customers say poor performance remains a problem and 13% say that the product cannot handle the required data volumes. However, both percentages are above average. However, Tableau has the best user community that’s highly engaged.
Summary
Magic Quadrant is an evaluation of the providers which are competing in a specific market, but it doesn’t rate any given product or product features (it rates the providers).
Competition shakes off complacency and forces the marketplace to focus on your core consumers/audience. If these companies are consistently trying to innovate and better themselves; with this level of healthy competition it helps to ensure that we as consumers have choice in price, selection, and service.
Thanks for reading!
