2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Parallel42 team have been working with both Power BI and Tableau 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 & Analytics. You can read the full report here.

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.

Gartner had this to say about the strengths and cautions for Power BI / Microsoft, and Tableau / Salesforce:

Microsoft

Microsoft 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

• 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&A personas and use cases.
• 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.
• 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.

Cautions

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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

• 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.
• 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&A ecosystem with technology partnership.
• 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.

Cautions

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.