2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant

Parallel42 continue to partner with key market leaders: Power BI and Tableau. 

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 & Analytics. You can read the full report here. 

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.

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 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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

• 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.
• 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&A business.
• 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.

Cautions

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

If you are considering, or currently using, Power BI and/or Tableau then feel free to contact us to best understand your options with each platform, including features, functionality and pricing.