Did you know Microsoft BI is top ranked in Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant?

Microsoft offers a competitive and expanding set of BI and analytics capabilities, packaging and pricing that appeal to Microsoft developers, independent distributors and now to business users. It does so through a combination of enhanced BI and data discovery capabilities in Office (Excel) 2013, data management capabilities in SQL Server, and collaboration, content, and user and usage management capabilities in SharePoint. 

Strengths 

• Of the megavendors, Microsoft has made the most progress toward delivering a combination of business user capabilities with an enterprise-capable platform. Microsoft delivered business-user-oriented data discovery and other BI capabilities in Excel 2013. It is enhancing these aggressively through its Power BI cloud offering by adding geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL with usage and trust ratings across internal and external data sources, as well as the ability to promote a personal PowerPivot workbook to an enterprise data source. These enhancements contribute to Microsoft's overall vision and make it a strong contender for addressing the requirements to bridge the divide between business and enterprise users. 

• Microsoft has made early investments in its cloud-based BI offering, Power BI. Microsoft's strategy is to use the cloud to increase adoption of its new and most competitive BI capabilities in Excel (starting with Excel 2013), and to accelerate enhancements to Excel to every six months. This strategy is designed to lower the cost of ownership of BI and to reduce deployment challenges stemming from customers needing to implement and manage Office, SQL Server and SharePoint for the full range of Microsoft's BI capabilities. This combination can be particularly attractive for organizations that choose to standardize on Microsoft for information management. However, the success of this strategy will depend in large part on continued acceleration in users' acceptance and adoption of cloud-based BI. 

• Microsoft's strategy for bundling BI into its most widely used products, together with its enterprise pricing, often gives it a compelling value proposition in terms of license cost for organizations that want to deploy BI to a wider range of users, or that want to lower their overall BI license costs by using lower-cost tools for basic functions. In the customer survey conducted for this Magic Quadrant, more Microsoft customers cited TCO and license cost as their main reasons for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor than did those of most of the other vendors; this has been the case for each of the past seven years in which Gartner has conducted this survey. 

• Microsoft composite product score was above average across the 17 capabilities, when weighted for use. Microsoft customers appreciate its strong BI infrastructure and development tools. They also rated its reporting, ad hoc query, Microsoft Office integration, business user data mashup, embedded BI, collaboration, search BI and OLAP capabilities higher than the survey average. Importantly, unlike those of its megavendor competitors, Microsoft's customers rated customer experience (support and product quality) above the survey average. Moreover, Microsoft's success is also driven partly by its IT-oriented BI authoring tools within SQL Server, which are based on Visual Studio, a broadly adopted development environment. Microsoft customers rated its BI development tools as No. 1 in the survey, and its BI platform infrastructure as among the best, with a higher percentage of customers using both extensively. Furthermore, "wide availability of skills" is among the top reasons why customers select Microsoft more often than any of its competitors. While Microsoft's BI platform attracts small to midsize enterprises, it is also widely deployed in large enterprises as a standard. One of the highest percentage of customers in the survey reported standardizing on Microsoft's BI platform. 

Cautions 

• Although Microsoft's functional ratings have improved and it can offer a wide range of functions, it also has one of the highest percentages of users who say that absent or weak functionality is among the main reasons limiting broader deployment of its software. Mobile BI, interactive visualization and metadata management remain product weaknesses reported by customers. In particular, Microsoft lags behind most other BI vendors in delivering mobile BI capabilities, with some of the lowest results for mobile functionality and percentage use. Microsoft plans to offer HTML5 support that will enable browser-based viewing and exploration of reports from any device with an HTML5-capable browser. It also plans to use its cloud offering, Power BI, to deliver a Windows mobile app that offers a touchscreen-optimized mobile BI experience initially for Windows devices (support for an iOS version is planned for after the launch of Power BI). Latent demand for Microsoft's mobile BI is evident from the survey, with Microsoft's respondents including one of the highest percentages (51%) that plan to implement mobile BI in the coming year. Despite product enhancements, Microsoft BI is primarily used for static and parameterized reporting by report consumers. Although Microsoft has a broader range of users conducting more complex types of analysis this year than last, its support for more complex types of analysis and adoption by advanced users remains below the survey average. 

• Multiproduct complexity remains a challenge, now primarily for on-premises and hybrid deployments. Because Microsoft's BI platform capabilities span three different tools (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint) that also perform non-BI functions, the task of integrating components and building applications is left mainly to the customer. This "do it yourself" approach places more of the onus for BI solution development and integration of platform components on customers, compared with the all-in-one, purpose-built BI platforms offered by most other BI vendors. Microsoft is depending on its BI cloud offerings to reduce deployment complexity, particularly for smaller companies lacking the necessary skills. 

• Although Microsoft's partner-driven sales model drives global growth for the company, Gartner's inquiries suggest that this approach often makes it difficult for customers to find their Microsoft sales representative. This causes frustration that may put downward pressure on Microsoft's sales experience scores, which, despite a favorable view of Microsoft's pricing, are below the survey average.