Business Intelligence is the process of gathering, cleaning and transforming business data into information or knowledge using application-based methodologies, thereby enabling users to make effective, fact-based decisions.
Business Intelligence (BI) delivers a comprehensive platform which empowers organisations to build and deploy secure, scalable and manageable Reporting and Analytics solutions.
Microsoft's BI technology stack consists of tools which assist in providing optimised solutions for Business Intelligence and Data Mining activites. Microsoft BI makes use of the development tools in both Visual Studio and SQL Server, which enables organisations to readily adopt a complete, end-to-end BI strategy using the inherent features and capabilities of these products.
Microsoft BI allows users to discover, analyse and visualse data with powerful self-service user interfaces in Microsoft Excel and Power BI and also enables dissemination and sharing of reports and data.
What We Do
Our cost-effective approach harnesses the capability inherent in the Microsoft SQL Server technology suite without the need for investment in costly 3rd Party BI product software licenses and implementation services. In addition, our solution ensures that the integrity of information and consistency of data is maintained across a wide array of applications.
Data is extracted from operational systems such as SAP Business One via staging tables into a Data Warehouse.
The data is then cleaned, normalised and placed in a relational model utilising Fact and Dimension tables.
The Data Warehouse is regularly, and where appropriate, incrementally refreshed.
Data in the Data Warehouse is then read into Analysis Models where it is aggregated and calculations in the form of Measures are applied.
Our BI methodology enables clients with a comprehensive Analytics platform that:
Uses application components which are all part of existing Microsoft SQL Server technologies
Automatically delivers up-to-date information at regular intervals
Rapidly extracts and builds the data repositories required for reporting
Makes use of familiar, and easily adopted, front ends in Microsoft Excel and Power BI
Delivers trusted information which can be securely shared across your organisation
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a cloud based business analytics service for pulling together live views across all your data.
With Power BI you can now see all of your data through a single pane of glass. Live Power BI dashboards and reports show visualizations and KPIs from data residing both on-premises and in the cloud, providing a consolidated view across your business regardless of where your data lives.
There are several capabilities that differentiate Power BI from other offerings in the market.
Power BI provides faster time to insight. It is used for visualizing, exploring and extracting insights from data. It brings together data from diverse sources to deliver rich, comprehensive views of business operations.
There are several capabilities that are unique to Power BI – these include:
Pre-built dashboards and reports for popular SaaS solutions such as Marketo, Salesforce, GitHub, ZenDesk and many others
Dashboards and visualizations that support real-time updates
Secure, live connection to on-premises data sources to drive insight across the entire range of organizational information (Analysis Services, Azure SQL Database, SQL Database Auditing, Azure SQL Data Warehouse)
Automated scheduled refresh to keep your Power BI data in sync with on premises data sources
Native mobile applications for keeping users connected on the go
Easy integration with other Microsoft offerings, from Excel to Azure services
Intuitive data exploration, which enables users to ask questions of their data in plain English
Why Microsoft Business Intelligence
2016 - Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader, for the ninth consecutive year, in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.
In this comparison, Microsoft is placed furthest in vision within the Leaders quadrant.
Power BI delivers numerous benefits and differentiators
Pre-built content packs
Real-time dashboard updates
Live connections to on-premises and cloud data sources
Intuitive data exploration by using natural language query
Integration with familiar Microsoft products and services
Fast deployment, hybrid configuration, secure, and integrated with existing IT systems
Microsoft's Business Intelligence suite provides a complete, end-to-end and comprehensive range of applications to enable organisations to achieve powerful business insights at an affordable price point and low total cost of ownership.