Microsoft Shines in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms

For the sixteenth consecutive year, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. In addition, for the fifth year running, Microsoft has been positioned furthest to the right for ‘Completeness of Vision’ and highest in the ‘Ability to Execute’ in the Magic Quadrant​¹​.

These accolades can be attributed to the constant innovation and improvements made to Power BI. Over the past year, Microsoft has introduced hundreds of features and enhancements to Power BI, to empower individuals, teams, and organizations in extracting more value from their data​¹​.

Empowering every individual

Microsoft has introduced several features for report builders to work more efficiently. The introduction of datamarts in Power BI, a self-service capability, allows users to perform relational database analytics and uncover insights from their data. With the launch of data model editing, users can navigate to a dataset and edit it using a similar model view interface as found inside Power BI Desktop. This feature allows users to work and collaborate simultaneously on the same data model. A new Optimize ribbon has been added in Power BI Desktop, providing options to pause and refresh visual queries and optimization presets. Other noteworthy features include contextual on-object controls for Power BI visuals and a feature that leverages the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create quick measures suggestions for Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)​¹​.

Empowering every team

Microsoft has worked on improving how users share their reports and visuals with their team members. New integrations with Microsoft PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Office Hub, and Teams, help organizations foster a data-driven culture. Users can now include interactive Power BI reports or even single visuals directly in PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails. The ability to save Power BI files to OneDrive and SharePoint and edit from there directly has been introduced to facilitate collaborative report building. Numerous features have been released to bring Power BI and Microsoft Teams closer together. To help teams align around the same targets, Microsoft also announced the general availability of metrics in Power BI, a new experience to help teams track their most important business metrics and objectives​¹​.

Empowering every organization

For organizations, Microsoft introduced several features to help with governance and administration. Extensions of Microsoft Purview data loss prevention (DLP) policies for Power BI were released to detect the uploading of sensitive information. Enhancements for these DLP policies include CPU metering for DLP policy evaluation and overriding policy tips for reporting false positives. Greater governance controls over ‘My workspaces’ allow admins to access the contents of any user’s workspace, designate a capacity for all existing and new workspaces, and prevent users from moving workspaces to a different capacity. An automated migration tool was also published for organizations that have Power BI reports with a live connection to Azure Analysis Services (AAS)​¹​.