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If you help make decisions about which vendors your business hires, then you should be familiar with Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Magic Quadrants offer one-to-one vendor comparisons outlining strengths and cautions for each, as well as insights into overall market status.
Two recent Quadrants for Data Management and Data Analytics & Business Intelligence highlighted three data tools that happen to be our favorites, as well. Tableau and Power BI’s flexibility and ease of use are already well known. We’re pleased to see that Snowflake has also joined the Leaders quadrant for Data Management--and they’re in great company alongside fellow newcomer Google.
Every business should consider these options when building a mature data strategy. We’ve compiled the most important info about all three for your consideration. Each of these technologies offers free trials to reduce buyer risk.
One of Snowflake’s key benefits is its ‘dynamic elasticity’ - that’s a fancy way of saying that it’s extremely flexible and scalable across a variety of workloads. Snowflake operates as a service on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and features a host of integrations with industry-standard formats--we especially like that it supports R.
We also love Snowflake’s level of customer service, and their clients agree--it’s near the top of the list in terms of overall customer experience. In terms of pricing, Snowflake’s capabilities are well-rounded enough to offer very high value at a competitive cost. With Snowflake you only pay for the compute and storage that you actually use, and their website lays out a myriad of options that allow you to scale the solution for your needs pretty specifically. You can even sign up for a 30-day free “test drive” to see how Snowflake works for you.
The future looks bright for Snowflake as they evolve toward new capabilities and fresh partnerships for 2019--in fact, just yesterday Snowflake announced a partnership with AgilOne to provide "reporting and full SQL access to processed, record-level data within AgilOne with fast query performance via Snowflake – making vast amount of omni-channel customer data, enhanced with online-offline identity resolution, behavioral and predictive analytics, easily accessible to marketing, IT, and data science teams."
Power BI tops the list of leaders for Gartner’s Data Analytics & BI Magic Quadrant with its data preparation, data discovery, interactive dashboard and augmented analytics capabilities. Power BI offers the most capabilities when run as a SaaS option in the Azure cloud, but is flexible enough to run on-premises as Power BI Report Server (for sharing reports, not dashboards). With Power BI in the Azure cloud, you gain machine-learning capabilities that can empower you to move to a more mature business intelligence strategy.
Power BI is one of the lowest priced options out there at $9.99 per user per month. Power BI Premium is also an option, with a set monthly price (dependent on business requirements and scale) without individual user licenses.
Power BI is especially easy to implement for those organizations that already primarily run on Microsoft technology and software. They’ve been especially instrumental in democratizing data by setting a very affordable price point, putting pressure on the market to drive higher competition with lower prices. Ease of use, visual appeal, and a strong roadmap for future capabilities all make Power BI a solid bet.
With so many opportunities for integration and capability augmentation, the options can get overwhelming--that’s why Microsoft has built a strong community of partners. As a Microsoft Power BI partner, Onebridge can take the guesswork and stress out of designing the right Power BI solution for your business. We navigate pricing and functionality to offer you crystal clear options based on your unique criteria--and offer any continuing support you need with your Power BI solution in the future.
We’ve also partnered with Tableau to offer the same services. Tableau is well-known for its intuitive and interactive user interface. They were really the first on the market with a solution that allows business users to get insights from their data without any existing data analytics or technical knowledge. Since then, they’ve continued to innovate and lead the market in visual data exploration.
Tableau offers an exhaustive list of connectors to other systems (Oracle, SAP, Snowflake and Hadoop just to name a few) to make importing data simple and intuitive, and they’ve added drag-and-drop capability to many advanced analytics tasks like forecasting and clustering.
Customer experience and support is rated highly, with Tableau focusing on ensuring its customers reach their business goals--in no small part thanks to their network of Alliance Partners (and yes, of course Onebridge has signed on as an Alliance Partner!) Plus, Tableau is flexible to implement, available in the cloud, online or on-premises.
Building a data strategy is a painstaking process that can be difficult to navigate. Decisions like in house server vs cloud, or data warehouse vs data lake have a big impact on your business--so where do you begin? Whether you need a comprehensive business analytics roadmap, data warehouse consulting services, a full data governance implementation roadmap, or even if you just want to know how to increase marketing effectiveness, we can help. Contact us today for a risk-free BI assessment.
