Growth of Power BI as a Business Intelligence tool

Business Intelligence can be best described as a process of eliciting new insights from data within a project, the projects may be small, one-time, or long-term. The growth of BI in the market is rapid and the need for moving into data-based decision-making is largely acquired by the organizations. As a result of this move, the BI market size is expected to grow to 43 Billion USD in 2028 with an 8.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). The forecast was based on the BI Market growth in 2020 rose to 22.6 billion USD and further underwent 24.05 billion USD in 2021(Source: dataprot).

BI market does cover all segments from Components, Implementation, Applications, End-use Industries, and Regions. Some of the top contributing BI tools in the BI market such as Microsoft Corporation, Tableau Software, IBM, SAS, SAP, and Oracle. Among these companies, the Power BI product of Microsoft is the most popular BI tool with a 36% market share in 2021, pursued by Tableau Desktop with a market share of 20% and Qlik sense with a market share of 11%.

Apart from this, the majority of the BI tools are compared with Power BI in the market in terms of Price, Ease of use, Connectivity for data, and other features. Let's find out what makes Power BI be most sort-out BI tool in the market.

Power BI Features:

• Data Connectivity - Power BI has a wide range of connectivity right from File (Excel, CSV, PDF, JSON, etc.), Database (MSSQL, SQL, Postgres, Access, etc.), Power Platform (Dataverse, Dataflows, etc.), Azure (Azure SQL database, Azure products), Online Services (Sharepoint, Google Analytics, GitHub, etc.) and Other sources like Python script, R script, Google sheets, etc. with its wide range of connectivity we can gather data from almost all the platforms with ease.

• Data Modeling - It is the process of creating a relationship with the dataset, connecting different tables based on the Primary Key column. Data modeling in Power BI uses two types of schemas - Start and Snowflake.

• Power Query - Power Query is used in many applications for Microsoft products, the purpose of the power query is to perform the ETL process, where data is transformed, filtered, and manipulated that fits the needs. Power Query is very unique to Power BI whereas some of the other BI tools do not have this feature.

• Visualizations - Power BI has many built-in visuals, which we can use the visual to build Dashboards and Reports. There are other ways to get built-in visuals through the Power BI marketplaces as required.

• Pricing of Power BI - Power BI Desktop is a free version that anyone can use it to create Dashboards. But Power BI Service comes with a cost that is used for the purpose of handling the Dashboards in the cloud and sharing reports within and outside the organizations. Power BI Service cost is less when compared to other BI tools like QlikView and Tableau.

Other Features of Power BI are

• Power BI Q&A

• Power BI Smart Summary

• Power Bi Mobile App

• Auto Refresh of reports in the cloud

• Row-Level Security

• Report Sharing

• DAX Functions for Measures

• Slicers and Maps

• Publish the Dashboard to the Public or any destination

Conclusion:

Power BI does come with a lot of easy-to-use features and is very easy to handle and share the reports, but in the end when it comes to pricing, power BI stands out with the power-packed features at a lower cost when compared to other BI tools. Apart from the Power BI community does release new features of the software to stay up to date and helps in creating your own KPI through DAX Measures.