We are thrilled to announce that, for the seventeenth consecutive year, Microsoft has been positioned as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.* Microsoft has also been positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision and highest in the Ability to Execute in the Magic Quadrant for the sixth consecutive year.
We are incredibly grateful for another year positioned as a Leader in this report, and it’s all due to the millions of active users that engage with Microsoft Power BI and make our community so vibrant. Over the last year, your feedback has been critical to create and refine the huge amount of innovation we’ve added to the Power BI platform—most notably the introduction of Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Fabric.
Let’s look at some of the biggest changes we brought to Power BI over the last 12 months.
The evolution of Power BI into Fabric
Last year, we launched one of the biggest evolutions since we originally released Power BI over a decade ago—Fabric. Fabric is a complete analytics platform that reshapes how your teams work with data by bringing everyone together with tools for every data professional. Fabric brought the power of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Factory to Power BI in a single, unified software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Now, with Fabric, data analysts and business users can work side-by-side with data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, and other data professionals—all working in the same SaaS experience and from the same unified data lake, OneLake, to uncover insights.
The infusion of generative AI in Power BI
We also brought a number of next-generation AI experiences to Power BI, including Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, a transformational experience which helps users quickly get started and be more productive in the Power BI web experience. Based on your high-level prompt, Copilot can create an entire report page for you by identifying and visualizing the tables, fields, measures, and charts that help you unlock critical insights. You can then customize the page using our existing editing experience. Copilot can also help you understand your semantic model and even suggest topics for your report pages. It’s a fast and easy way to spin up new reports, especially if you’re less familiar with developing dashboards in Power BI. And this is only the start for Copilot in Fabric. We are continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible with more and more features, like the Copilot-powered “Data overview” button that provides a summary of your semantic model and can even generate synonyms and linguistic relationships to ready your model for natural language interpretation. You can also use Copilot to write and explain Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) queries or even summarize your report page with the Narrative visual page.
Recently, we also announced a new generative AI capability called AI skills. With AI skills, users can learn more about their data through a conversational Q&A experience. You simply choose your data source and start asking questions about the data without any setup or configuration. The AI skill will reply with not only the answer, but the query it used to obtain the answer. AI skills, Copilot in Fabric, and other AI-infused experiences in Power BI are all helping everyone get more work done, faster, while finding the data-driven insights they need.
A unified data foundation with OneLake and Direct Lake mode
With the release of Fabric, we also unveiled OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake that is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication. And one of the biggest benefits of OneLake for Power BI users is Direct Lake mode. Direct Lake mode unlocks incredible performance when working with data in OneLake, with no data movement or duplication. Power BI datasets in Direct Lake mode enjoy query performance on par with import mode, with the real-time consistency of DirectQuery. And the data never leaves the lake, so there is no need to manage refreshes.
Given the excitement Direct Lake mode generated, we continued releasing enhancements, including Power BI semantic model support for Direct Lake on the Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric workload, row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS), stored credentials for Direct Lake semantic models, expansion of semantic model scale-out to Direct Lake mode, and more. We even enabled integration of import-mode semantic models into OneLake, so you can enjoy the benefits of Direct Lake without any migration effort.
Empowering data analysts in Power BI
While these updates represent the biggest changes to Power BI, we also released a set of tools for our engaged and growing community of report builders. For example, we released the new model explorer and DAX query views that can help analysts work even faster and more effectively by enabling end-to-end visibility of semantic models in a tree view, with the ability to write, edit, and see the results of DAX expressions or queries directly in their model. And seamless Git integration for Power BI semantic models and reports enables you to now easily connect your workspace to Azure DevOps repositories to track changes, edit versions, or merge updates on tasks from multiple team members into a single source of truth that’s instantly synced into one workspace.
We’ve also made it easier for you to quickly build stunning reports, even right from the web experience. With our enhanced web authoring experience, users can navigate to a semantic model and collaborate with others to simultaneously modify the models’ measures, role level security, format strings, and relationships. We also released Explore in the Power BI service, a new way to create matrices or visual views of your data to easily ingest or look up information without having to build a full report. And we released a number of new and improved visuals like the new button slicer, new card visual, enhancements for columns, bars, and ribbons, geospatial data visual with Microsoft Azure Maps, and new formatting options. You can even use the new on-object formatting to select elements in charts and edit the format to create pixel-perfect reports that match your exact vision.
Find out why Microsoft was named a Leader
Check out how companies like KPMG, Chanel, and Zeiss have used many of these features to turn their data into immediate impact across their teams. And this only scratches the surface of hundreds of capabilities we’ve released over the past year. Follow the monthly features summaries on our Power BI blog and YouTube channel to stay up to date with the latest updates. And if you want to get hands-on experience with all of the new features I mentioned above, you can join us at the upcoming European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference held in Stockholm, Sweden, from September 23 to 26, 2024. You can also ramp up on Microsoft Fabric and advance your career by visiting the new Fabric Career Hub. The career hub gives you access to free on-demand and live trainings, discounts on certification exams, career insights from community experts, and role guidance to understand how Fabric can open potential opportunities. You can also join us in the Microsoft Fabric community to post your questions, share your feedback, and learn from others.
Get your complimentary copy of the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and find out why Microsoft was named a Leader for the seventeenth year in a row.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Kurt Schlegel, Anirudh Ganeshan, David Pidsley, Julian Sun, Georgia O’Callaghan, Christopher Long, Kevin Quinn, Fay Fei, Edgar Macari, Jamie O’Brien [June 20, 2024]
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