Teo’s Best and Worst of Microsoft BI in 2013

In the spirit of the last day of 2013, I’m sipping eggnog and contemplating on BI in 2013.

BEST

1. Microsoft leads the Gartner’s 2013 Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant.
2. Microsoft leads the Gartner’s 2013 Data Warehouse Magic Quadrant.
3. Power View connectivity to Multidimensional (DAXMD) released in CU4 of SQL Server 2012 SP1.
4. SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse appliance released with Hadoop support at very attractive pricing.
5. Microsoft is the first vendor to offer natural queries (unfortunately only in the cloud at this point).

WORST

1. Microsoft not doing enough to compete effectively on the presentation/visualization front against third party vendors. I’ll throw poor mobile support into this bucket too.
2. Slow pace of BI enhancements across product groups. Example: Excel’s still lacking Power View support for Multidimensional (DAXMD was released in May).
3. Microsoft pushing cloud BI and deciding to prioritize cloud enhancements, such as natural query, over on premises.
4. Microsoft’s ongoing preoccupation with Tabular (it’s difficult to find a good case for it as it’s caught now in the middle between columnstore indexes and Multidimensional) and self-service BI (focus should be 80% on organizational BI and 20% on personal).
5. Still no metadata lineage and change impact. What happened to Project Barcelona?

Happy New Year!