Gartner, the reputed research giant has finally revealed its Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platform for the year 2019 and Microsoft has been again listed as a leader in the segment.
Most organizations are aware that Microsoft offers a competitive and expanding set of BI along with competitive analytics capabilities. The points in favor of the company are:
- Independent distributor channel
- Enhanced BI and data discovery capabilities in Excel
- Strategy to enhance BI capabilities in its core offerings especially Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint
- Leverage its cloud offering to enhance opportunities to increase its market share
- Deliver value by lowering cost of ownership and adoption of new releases.
By incorporating BI capabilities in most of the products, Microsoft virtually strives to keep its BI offerings alive in many ways especially with expanded adoption in Microsoft’s own clients. This strategy has worked for the company since it has now reached the top 3 spot.
This is evident in the Magic Quadrant customer survey, which revealed that their customers cite total cost of ownership and license cost to be the basic reason why they select Microsoft as a BI vendor.
With the recent and planned enhancements to Excel, Microsoft has finally begun to deliver on its strategic road map and vision which makes Excel as the primary BI tool for many organizations. Over the next year, the company is expected to deliver high-value and competitive enhancements to most of its products especially Excel with geospatial and 3D analysis.
Microsoft Excel users mostly include BI users who can analyze with different IT-centric tools and do not particularly adhere to a single solution. This is beneficial for Microsoft in many ways. According to Gartner, Microsoft is planning aggressively to enhance Excel which will soon pose a threat to different offices. With the new Office, many users already a compelling reason for using its BI capabilities which they use in certain measures in Excel. Microsoft has tried to shorten its product update cycles while using the cloud for delivery in the latest releases. Microsoft also continues to be quite a positive influence in the development environment. This approach, along with targeted marketing efforts has helped the company to lower the cost involved and expand the use of BI.