Parallel42 continue to partner with key market leaders: <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/microsoft-power-bi/">Power BI</a> and <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/tableau/">Tableau</a>.&nbsp;In 2024's update, Gartner continue to recognise Microsoft (Power BI) and Salesforce (Tableau) as Leaders in the latest Gartner 2024 ‘Magic Quadrant’ for BI &amp; Analytics. <a href="https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2HVUGEM6&amp;ct=240620&amp;st=sb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">You can read the full report here.</a>&nbsp;Each platform was assessed for core functionality including automated insights, analytics catalog, data preparation, data storytelling, data visualisation, governance, natural language query, reporting, data science integration, and collaboration.<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:68.43%;"><img src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/Gartner_2024_small_5a5087dad5.png" alt="Gartner 2024 small.png"></figure>Gartner had this to say about the strengths and cautions for Power BI (Microsoft), and Tableau (Salesforce):MicrosoftMicrosoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its primary ABI platform, Power BI, has massive market reach and momentum through Microsoft 365, Azure and Teams integration, flexible pricing, well-above-average functionality, and an ambitious product roadmap. In 2023, Microsoft announced Fabric to provide a comprehensive and integrated data analytics platform. As a result, Power BI has become part of a broader suite that, in addition to ABI, also delivers data management, data science and real-time analytics. While the Power BI Premium product capabilities will not change, starting 1 July 2024, customers will no longer be able to buy the P-SKU and instead will need to buy the F-SKU for Fabric.Strengths<ul><li style="margin-left:0px;">Strong combination of price, functionality and ecosystem: Over the last four years, Microsoft has become the dominant vendor in the ABI platform market due to a combination of low prices, comprehensive functionality, and integration with a widely deployed ecosystem that includes Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Copilot brand closely associated with generative AI: Starting with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and now moving onto Copilot for Power BI, Microsoft can leverage emerging generative AI technologies to drive adoption and accelerate the report creation process.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Power portfolio and product ambition: Microsoft has a clear vision for cross-utilization of Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate to drive business value. Power Apps can be embedded in Power BI dashboards, or it can access Power BI datasets. 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.</li></ul>Cautions<ul><li style="margin-left:0px;">Governance of content creation and publication: Gartner continues to receive a significant number of inquiries from Power BI customers struggling to govern the analytic content creation and publication process. These concerns will be exacerbated in the Copilot era. Customers express concerns over multiple ways to accomplish most tasks, such as modeling data or promoting content. For example, data modeling tasks can be done with datasets, data marts, dataflows and Dataverse. With the low cost and easy setup, Power BI deployments tend to proliferate, and it is difficult to enforce standard governance practices.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Unproven interoperability: While most Power BI customers appreciate the tight integration of the Microsoft architecture, there is an increasing demand to see more interoperability with competitive platforms. Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake architecture is a step in the right direction toward working with other data management platforms. However, how well OneLake will perform with other databases is yet to be seen.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Azure as the only deployment option: Microsoft does not give customers the flexibility to choose a cloud IaaS offering. While data connectivity enables multicloud and hybrid scenarios, Microsoft’s Power BI service runs only in Azure.</li></ul>&nbsp;Tableau (Salesforce)Tableau, a Salesforce company, is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its products are mainly focused on visual-based exploration that enables business users to access, prepare, analyze and present findings in their data. Tableau has global operations and serves clients of all sizes. In 2023, Tableau introduced Tableau Pulse, an augmented analytics experience designed for business users in day-to-day workflows. Pulse is built on a new metrics layer that improves governance and trust. Tableau has enhanced its embedded analytics capabilities by including an embedded playground that automatically generates code snippets to interact with Tableau “vizzes.” It also has introduced usage-based pricing to scale embedded analytics for use cases with high numbers of users who interact with analytics infrequently.Strengths<ul><li style="margin-left:0px;">From monolithic to composable analytics: Tableau is improving both its technology and commercial flexibility. It has reengineered its architecture to become more composable for agility, including the newly released VizQL data service for developers, a new Tableau Pulse metrics layer on top of data sources for generative analytics experience, and a new consumption-based pricing model in its Embedded Analytics offering. This progressive vision toward composability will allow users to extract insights from Tableau more easily.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Dedicated leadership: Despite being acquired by Salesforce, Tableau now operates under its own dedicated leadership team, inclusive of a CEO, CPO and CMO. This structure underscores Tableau’s strategic significance within the Salesforce portfolio and reaffirms the commitment to its D&amp;A business.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Strong corporate viability: Tableau reported a robust 16% growth rate in FY23, outperforming many vendors in this Gartner Magic Quadrant, some of which reported business contraction.</li></ul>Cautions<ul><li style="margin-left:0px;">Pricing structure: Tableau primarily employs a role-based pricing model. Tableau Embedded Analytics, with its consumption-based pricing model, brings a new layer of complexity to the calculation.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Complexity of product portfolio: Tableau has significantly expanded its product suite, adding Tableau Pulse capabilities under its Tableau AI umbrella. This extensive product packaging, while demonstrating the company’s innovative capabilities, may pose a challenge for clients in comprehending the distinct functionalities and variations across different versions.</li><li style="margin-left:0px;">Changing competitive dynamics: Most of the large cloud and business application vendors are repackaging their products in a comprehensive data and analytics suite. In order to effectively compete in the areas of large-scale enterprise reporting and advanced analytics use cases, Tableau needs to strategically refine its market position within Salesforce Data Cloud.</li></ul>&nbsp;If you are considering, or currently using, Power BI and/or Tableau then feel free to <a href="https://p42.co.nz/contact-us/">contact us</a> to best understand your options with each platform, including features, functionality and pricing.

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Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms

2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Parallel42 team have been working with both <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/microsoft-power-bi/">Power BI</a> and <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/tableau/">Tableau</a> on a lot of projects. It’s great to read that Gartner continue to recognise Microsoft (Power BI) and Salesforce (Tableau) as Leaders in the latest Gartner 2023 ‘Magic Quadrant’ for BI &amp; Analytics. <a href="https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2CF2LJQ8&amp;ct=230130&amp;st=sb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">You can read the full report here.</a>Each platform was assessed for automated insights, analytics catalog, data preparation, data source connectivity, data storytelling, data visualisation, governance, natural language query, reporting, data science integration, metrics store and collaboration.<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2023_Gartner_Magic_Quadrant_for_Analytics_and_Business_Intelligence_Platforms_f583c256e2.png" alt="2023_Gartner_Magic_Quadrant_for_Analytics_and_Business_Intelligence_Platforms.png"></figure>Gartner had this to say about the strengths and cautions for Power BI / Microsoft, and Tableau / Salesforce:&nbsp;MicrosoftMicrosoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its primary ABI platform, Power BI, has massive market reach and momentum through Microsoft 365, Azure and Teams integration, flexible pricing, well-above-average functionality, and an ambitious product roadmap.In 2022, Microsoft added a metric-tracking capability that enables teams to align their goals and key priorities in a collaborative visual experience. Its new Premium Gen 2 increases price/performance and value through its autoscale capabilities. Finally, Microsoft added low-code data marts for easy access to self-serve managed relational analytics solutions.Strengths<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Alignment with Microsoft 365, Teams and Azure Synapse: The inclusion of Power BI in Microsoft 365 E5 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 D&amp;A personas and use cases.</li><li>Price/value combination: The Power BI service now has a per-user offering to appeal to smaller organizations with 300 or fewer employees. Large organizations can still opt for the per-capacity option, which tends to be more cost-effective with more users. Microsoft doesn’t use a cross-selling strategy to increase revenue per customer, like most ABI platform vendors do.</li><li>Power portfolio and product ambition: Microsoft has a clear vision for cross-utilization of Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate to drive business value. Power Apps can be embedded in Power BI dashboards or it can access Power BI datasets. 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.</li></ul>Cautions<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Governance of content creation and publication: Gartner receives an increasing number of inquiries from Power BI customers struggling to govern the analytic content creation and publication process. Customers express concern over multiple ways to accomplish most tasks such as modeling data or promoting content. For example, data modeling tasks can be done with datasets, data marts, dataflows and Dataverse. With the low cost and easy setup, Power BI deployments tend to proliferate, and it is difficult to enforce standard governance practices.</li><li>Limited headless, open architecture: While most Power BI service customers appreciate the tight integration of the Microsoft architecture, there is an increasing demand to see more interoperability across competitive BI platforms. In particular, as an analytics catalog and a metrics store, many Power BI customers would like to see more open, headless integration with products competitive to Microsoft.</li><li>Azure as the only deployment option: Microsoft does not give customers the flexibility to choose a cloud IaaS offering. While data connectivity enables multicloud and hybrid cloud scenarios, its Power BI service runs only in Azure. However, customers that utilize Azure can take advantage of the global reach and multigeography capabilities offered by Microsoft’s cloud platform.</li></ul>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Salesforce (Tableau)Tableau, a Salesforce company, is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its products are mainly focused on visual-based exploration that enables business users to access, prepare, analyze and present findings in their data. CRM Analytics, formerly Tableau CRM, provides augmented analytics capabilities for analysts and citizen data scientists. Tableau has global operations and serves clients of all sizes.In 2022, Tableau reinforced its augmented consumer vision to provide contextualized insights with deeper integration with Salesforce Data Cloud. IT also improved decision intelligence by bringing domain-aware insights into action with Revenue Intelligence and other Salesforce-native apps. The extensible design and x-platform integrations (Salesforce Flow, MuleSoft, UiPath and Looker) further enable composable analytics to bring insights into workflow with agility.Strengths<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Tableau as a skill: Tableau has created a massive community of visual analytic developers that influences ABI buying decisions. Its user community has become a strong self-learning hub to drive tool adoption, improving its market momentum by increasingly demanding Tableau skills from the talent market.</li><li>Agnostic and flexible position: Although acquired by Salesforce, Tableau remains a more cloud-, data source- and application-agnostic choice compared to some of its competitors. The users can still use the on-premises version with little difference from the cloud version. Organizations today still use a portfolio approach to build the analytics solutions, and Tableau has better composability in a wider D&amp;A ecosystem with technology partnership.</li><li>Analytics experience: The proprietary VizQL engine sits at the center of the entire analytics workflow of Tableau, providing an optimal visual analytics experience while more augmented analytics capabilities are incorporated into the platform. The user-centric product improves the multipersona collaboration within the tool, expanding the adoption of the tool by more business users.</li></ul>Cautions<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Market momentum and support concerns: While it is still showing strong market momentum, Tableau has had slower revenue growth recently. And clients are sharing concerns about recent layoffs. Also, timeliness of some support functions continues to be an issue, particularly for Standard Support customers, some of whom feel compelled to purchase the Premium Support add-on to receive adequate support.</li><li>Salesforce-centric innovation: Some of Tableau’s emerging capabilities, including CRM Analytics and Data Cloud, are designed to integrate with Salesforce. Some clients have expressed concerns about not getting the most of the combined platform if they don’t move to Salesforce. Alternatively, they will need to spend extra to get the capabilities that belong to the other product lines.</li><li>Serve on-premises clients: Tableau has a huge number of on-premises clients who use Tableau desktop and server. With the acquisition from Salesforce, the product portfolio has a clear direction to be cloud-first or even cloud-only, aligning with the overall Salesforce product strategy. This move could impact existing clients who have no plan to move to the cloud soon.</li></ul>

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2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant

The 2022 Super Rugby final will be the 40th game between The Blues and Crusaders. We looked into the history between these two teams in an infographic style dashboard: &nbsp;<a href="https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jeff.komen/viz/SuperRugbyFinal2022/2022SuperRugbyFinal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">(to use the interactive elements click here)</a><img src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2022_Super_Rugby_Final_87d4c39daa.png" alt="2022 Super Rugby Final.png">

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Analysing the history of Blues vs Crusaders matches.

Super Rugby Final 2022

The Parallel42 team have been working with both <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/microsoft-power-bi/">Power BI</a> and <a href="https://p42.co.nz/technology/tableau/">Tableau</a> on a lot of projects. It’s great to read that Gartner continue to recognise Microsoft (Power BI) and Salesforce (Tableau) as Leaders in the latest Gartner 2022 ‘Magic Quadrant’ for BI &amp; Analytics.<a href="https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-29HD7D53&amp;ct=220323&amp;st=sb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">You can read the full report here.</a><img src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/Gartner_2022_0b2e1f5599.jpg" alt="Gartner 2022.jpg">

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2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant

A well-designed dashboard is a powerful launch point for data-driven conversations. Armed with the same collection of information, your business makes faster decisions based on a single source of truth.&nbsp;A great dashboard’s message and metrics are clear, its color enhances meaning, and it delivers the most relevant information to your audience. So how do you build dashboards for your organisation that live up to this promise?This whitepaper will teach you 10 best practices for building the most effective dashboards for your audience - walking you through three sections of use cases and examples:&nbsp;<ol><li>Thoughtful planning</li><li>Informed design</li><li>Refining Your Dashboard</li></ol><a href="https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/2021-09/10%20Best%20Practices%20for%20Building%20Effective%20DashboardsWP.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Read a copy of the Whitepaper here:</a><a href="https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/2021-09/10%20Best%20Practices%20for%20Building%20Effective%20DashboardsWP.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img class="image_resized" style="width:34.66%;" src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_27_004818_97a07a7082.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-05-27 004818.png"></a>

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10 Best Practices for Building Effective Dashboards

Building Effective Dashboards

Power BI brings advanced analytics to the daily business decision process, allowing users to extract useful knowledge from data to solve business problems. This white paper will cover the advanced analytic capabilities of Power BI, including:<ul><li>Predictive analytics</li><li>Data visualizations</li><li>R integration</li><li>Data analysis expressions</li></ul><a href="http://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-CNTNT-PowerBI-Advanced-Analytics-with-PowerBI-white-paper.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Access your copy of the Whitepaper here.</a><img class="image_resized" style="width:40.54%;" src="https://p42-uploads.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_26_234429_6b96f24d5d.png" alt="Screenshot 2022-05-26 234429.png">&nbsp;

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Advanced Analytics with Power BI

Insights