Forrester, a well-known consulting and research firm, commissioned a study titled “The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure Analytics with Power BI.” From that study, it was proven that together, the two platforms can deliver an ROI of 271% in just three years. This blog will uncover the three distinct areas in your business that will be impacted by utilizing these two powerful Microsoft products.
1. The Total Cost of Ownership
The Total Cost of Ownership is the purchase price of an asset plus the costs of operation. TCO can be lowered by 25% thanks to Power BI and Azure Analytics. Through Power BI, customers can drive a data culture by allowing everyone in their organization to access the platform. Authors can use Power BI Desktop for free, and end–users can access Power BI for only $10 per user per month. When combined with Azure Analytics, most of your infrastructure is managed by Microsoft. This will lower TCO, which will result in notable savings for companies. “We can quickly roll out Power BI to anyone who needs it, and, compared with other solutions that charge over $1000 for a desktop license, Power BI Desktop is free,” stated Rashid Khan, Director of Analytics at Fordham University.
2. Time to Insight
The Forrester study found that the two Microsoft platforms helped to speed up Time to Insight, or TTI. TTI is the time it takes a company to access relevant data. In the tech industry, it is critical to retrieve important information as quickly as possible. Waiting for data to refresh, queries to run, and hiring highly skilled data scientists are fortunately a thing of the past. With Power BI, users can add AI models via point and click experience through a no-code report authoring experience. By combining Power BI and Azure Analytics, the data and actionable insights can be retrieved within seconds. “The Power BI machine learning algorithms made unlocking insights from qualitative feedback quick, efficient, and meaningful. We can now parse hundreds of thousands of customer comments for sentiment, themes, and issues with a speed and level of analysis that our human efforts simply could not achieve,” commented Lee Sherry, Head of Analytics and Data Science at Geocaching.
3. Productivity
It was noted that self-service tools and automation through Power BI and Azure Analytics saved around 1.75 hours per week for business users. Power BI brings in tools from Office 365, Excel, and PowerPoint that improves human productivity. Also, the integration with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint allows for additional collaboration between team members. These capabilities, combined with Azure’s automated server management, can greatly improve productivity for an organization. “End-User empowerment is key. Everyone in the company can now produce better data visualizations and can access the data faster. Collaboration, communication, and visibility on analytics have greatly improved,” stated an Enterprise Architect interviewed during the Forrester study
When every person in your organization has access to powerful insights, your business can achieve a truly data-driven culture. The combination of Azure Analytics and Power BI together can unlock the performance as well as security for your entire team. To get more information on Azure Analytics, you can head to Microsoft’s website. Our team at DCG will be able to assist you with any questions you may have about an upcoming implementation or project. We can work directly with other Microsoft partners in several different ways. If you need additional staffing, full project management, or white label services, feel free to reach out!
