Business Intelligence Software

Business Intelligence Software, Tools and Supplier Vendors

Is Power BI now the Business Intelligence default option?

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Power BI was first released to the general public on July 24, 2015 by Microsoft.

Since then it has gained a huge user community across enterprise organisations and SME’s due to it’s rich features, ease of use and compatibility with other Microsoft products.

In February 2019, Gartner.com, the leading enterprise software review and consultancy, confirmed Microsoft as Leader in the BI tools and Data visualisation workspace.

Power BI is a SaaS service that Microsoft initially released as an add-on to Excel.

It is now a reporting and analytics solution in its own right for enterprises of all sizes. By virtue of being from the Microsoft family, it seamlessly integrates with other products from the vendor, including Office 365.

Looking at Microsoft power BI customers by industry, Computer Software (16%), Information Technology and Services (11%) and Hospital & Health Care (6%) are the largest segments.

As the BI market continues to evolve, it demonstrates how critical the right business intelligence tools is in a data-driven world.

Worldwide data creation will grow to 63 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. For scale, that is about 500 billion iPhones worth of storage. In light of this explosive growth, business intelligence tools are more important than ever and PBI is a key player in this area.

Currently, one vendor — Microsoft — dominates the market in terms of user adoption. The massive growth of the Microsoft Power BI cloud service has continued, fuelled in part by the bundling of this product with Office 365 at a greatly reduced price.

Power-BI Review

It seems that many organisations view Power BI as being the default option for Data Visualisation and Business Intellegence tools.

Microsofts cost effective pricing for Power BI has driven market share given the eye watering costs of offering from other vendors.

An example is Oracle OBIEE which can result in $millions in licensing costs for a mid range BI toolset when PBI may be a few thousand dollars.

Microsoft PBI has market share of c10% in the business intelligence bi market and this outstrips the competion.

Please click here for a full Power BI Review.

 

 

SQL2022 Release Date – Are we nearing the end of the road for SQL Server?

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SQL2022 Release Date is currently scheduled for a release in mid 2022.

Microsoft typically does not announce any actual release dates until very close to the release.

The current version is Microsoft SQL Server 2019, released November 4, 2019. The RTM version is 15.0.

The lack of a clear roadmap for Microsoft SQL Server is a bit disconcerting given the huge user base of this Enterprise solution.

Many key users see Microsoft pushing hard on on all things Azure and it’s clear that the subscription model via the Cloud is the future.

However for some users Azure can be painfully expensive is the design is not correct or optimised.

SQL Server will be supported until the latter end of the decade but having seen what happened to Office and so many other Microsoft products some users are wondering whether Azure is the writing on the wall for SQL Server.

How soon will it be before Microsoft gives us the ultimatum of migrating to Azure or else?

sql2022 release date

Typically before a major release of a critical product like SQL, Microsoft normally deliver a Community Technology Preview (CTP).

The CTP will precede the SQL2022 release date.

The CTP is normally issued to major systems integrators and large users as a “Alpha” style release.

Given the elapsed three years since the last release a number of new features are expected to be available with the SQL2022 release date

  • Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR)
  • Polybase – with SQL Server 2022, Polybase was expanded support Oracle, Teradata, MongoDb and more.
  • Key features available in Azure
  • Features currently working flawlessly in Azure will be migrated down to SQL Server 2022. And some of the slightly buggy features will appear in SQL Server 2021/2022 in a CU or SP once they get ironed out.

As with most Microsoft products, Microsoft provides mainstream support for a product for 5 years after its initial release. This means that for the first 5 years you may see new smaller features or enhancements added to the product along with any bug fixes and security patches. After this mainstream support ends you will usually get another 5 years of extended support at which time you can only expect bug fixes and security patches.

Business Objects BI 4.4

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Business Objects (from SAP) BI 4.4 is due to be released in Q1 2022 according to inside sources at SAP.

The next major release of SAP BO is expected to contain a number of major functional enhancements and improvements.

Key new features are expected to be increased analytics and visualations and improved user interface.

Business Objects

SAP Business Objects BI 4.3 beta was relased in Q4 2019.

The new version has met a cautious reception was key users and Business Intelligence Sofware industry watchers.

SAP Business Objects BI 4.4 was relased in June 2020 was welcomed by key users and Business Intelligence Sofware industry experts.

Business Objects

Previous SAP Business Objects Versions can be found here.

The Advantanges and Disadvantages of SAP BO can be summarsed as:

Advantages of SAP BO

  • Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
  • Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder’s needs.
  • The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.

Disadvantages of SAP BO

  • Users have indicated challenges inking up with data in  web portals. resulting in additional, unplanned development time,
  • Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.

SAP BO is a leading edge Business Intelligence tool for large and mid size organisatiosn that probably already use SAP as their main ERP solution.

Power BI Review Disadvantages Advantages Pros Cons

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Power BI Review – Power BI is a business intelligence and analytics tool provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualisations with self-service business intelligence capabilities.

Microsoft Power BI is a solid and proven BI solution that has a large and growing user base and solid support ecosystem both online and from reputable Microsoft partners and vendors.

Most organisations find they have a lot of data but very little insights and to that end Power BI is a rich and fully featured powerful cloud-based service that helps business users, Management Information owners and data scientists visualise and share insights from their organisations’ data.

Power BI offers the capability to access data from more than 40 different data sources and databases covering everything from SQL2019 to Hadoop and Mongo, Azure and even Spark based architectures.

power bi review

There are two ways of accessing Power BI:

1. Via windows desktop (mainly targeted at developers)
2. Via a cut-down browser version (mainly targeted at Execs and report consumers)

To undertake real data manipulation, analysis and development you will need the Windows version of Power BI.

Microsoft is developing Power BI at a rapid rate and new versions and functionality are being released to keep the product ahead of the game.

There is a wealth of online reporting and visualisation templates that can be used to quickly generate eye catching graphics, maps and data visualisations. These are very easy to use and help non technical users get valuable reports and MI to market quickly. This is one of the key strengths of Power BI over and above other market leaders in this space such as Tableau and Spotfire.

Power BI is easy to use and given it’s vast corporate user base from it’s Microsoft SQL heritage is a real Enterprise Business Intelligence tool.

Power BI also serves well as a Mobile BI tool – ideal for presenting information to one the move senior execs via a range of dashboards and easy to drill down visualisations.

Power BI Pricing

Power BI pricing falls into two brackets; free and paid for.

For the Pro version you can use this for as little as

SAP Business Objects Versions

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The SAP Business Objects versions are outlined below.

The most current SAP BO version is 4.3 and this version is a major release so users should consider migrating to SAP BI 4.3 as soon as possible.

Note that SAP BI 4.2 end of support

  1. End of Mainstream Maintenance: 31.12.2022
  2. End of Priority One Support Phase: 31.12.2024
  • SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 (SAP BI 4.3) was Released in June 2020
  • SAP Business Objects

SAP Business Objects

SAP BO 4.4 Release date is pending.