Brick and Caleb discuss the reasons they feel Power BI is almost always the right choice for your BI tool.
Welcome to The Dashboard Effect podcast. I'm Brick Thompson.
Caleb Ochs:And I'm Caleb Ochs.
Brick Thompson:Caleb, a very long time, no talk. Okay. (We're recording three of these today, so it's actually been about two minutes.) So, what are we talking about in in this episode, Caleb?
Caleb Ochs:So, we frequently get asked by all types of
people:Why do you guys use Power BI?
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I know. And it's a reasonable question. I mean, Power BI is kind of the "new kid on the block" of the bigger systems. You know, Tableau, Qlik, systems like that, were the ones that were really sort of owning the space in the same area as Power BI, and then Power BI came in and all of a sudden, it's just become sort of the... what's the saying... the 600 pound gorilla?
Caleb Ochs:Yep. Something like that. Yeah. Tableau was, I think, they were founded in 2002. Yeah. And Power BI didn't come out till '14.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, something like that.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah. No, don't quote me.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, about seven years ago. Yeah. Okay. So I know you've got a number one reason. Tell, tell me about that.
Caleb Ochs:The number one reason...we could have left it till the end, but let's go hot out the gate...
Brick Thompson:Did I just mess up?
Caleb Ochs:No, no. I didn't have any agenda. So the, you know, the biggest thing that I tell people is that it's the lowest barrier to entry, right?
Brick Thompson:Is that just in terms of cost? Or are you talking about just in terms of ease of use? How are you thinking about that?
Caleb Ochs:It really, in terms of cost is the primary thing. So when when somebody is getting started with BI, or maybe thinking about taking on a big initiative the cost is a big thing, right? And especially with the people that we work with, primarily in the middle market, they don't have a ton of excess capital to just toss around. So they typically want to start with something smaller to kind of prove things out, and make sure that the value is actually there. Power BI allows you to do that. You don't have to stand up any fancy servers. You don't need to bite off big licensing fees. It's $10 per user per month.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, yeah. And it's July of 2022 right now, but it's been that same cost I think since it launched.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, I don't think it's gone up at all. And in fact, tons of stuff has been added. So you get alot more value.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, yeah. So much. Yeah, and a lot of companies when they want to bring BI in, they don't want to just have two or three Power BI users who are then sending out reports to everybody. They'd like everybody to have access to reports. And that $10/month makes it a low barrier to entry.
Caleb Ochs:And there's other prices, too, right? They've got the $20 per month premium per user license, and they've got premium capacity starting at five grand a month. And there's a whole embedded SKUs there that they have that are different prices. So there's a lot of different licensing, but what we found is that $10 per user per month does just about anything you might need there. There are cases where you're gonna want premium, and you'll find those as you go. But to get started: $10 per user per month.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. So initially, you said it was just lowest barrier to entry. Cost is a big piece of that, but I think there's more to it, right?
Caleb Ochs:A lot more to it.
Brick Thompson:I mean, it's, it's a Microsoft product. So it's got an office-like interface. Works well with the Azure Cloud, works well (really well) with SQL Server and all of the Microsoft products that so many companies use.
Caleb Ochs:Right, and then Office 365 is, that's it. You know, you already have Office 365 licenses (at least most companies do.) Obviously there are exceptions, but most companies we work with do, because we're a Microsoft shop. You know, so they've already got office 365. It's a simple add-on to your licensing that you already have. And then you're up and running. I mean, it's just so simple.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. True. I think some people might get the impression then that, "Oh okay, well, you have to be a Microsoft shop to use Power BI." That's definitely not true. I mean, Power BI can connect to other databases, other data sources. But it does work best when it's paired with Microsoft, specifically, the Azure Cloud.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, and really what we're talking about is, is just the how easy it integrates with everything else. Power BI is just an extremely versatile tool, that'll be able to connect to anything, you know, just about. I mean, I guess theoretically, anything. You can write your own custom connections and stuff. And yeah, there's all kinds of options you have. But yeah, really, that ease of use is, is a big thing.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, it's amazing. And in fact, even you know, I'm a pretty technical executive. Nothing like you or your team on the delivery team, but I can throw together proof of concept reports really quickly in Power BI.
Caleb Ochs:Right? It makes it super easy. And one of our biggest things is adoption of reports, right? If you're gonna build a report, you want people to use it. So you want it to be really easy and familiar. And not... Let's get rid of all the barriers that we can for adoption.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I think you also said along the way, "It's the best." Why do you think it's the best?
Caleb Ochs:So Power BI wasn't always the best. Start there.
Brick Thompson:No, definitely not.
Caleb Ochs:So, let's see. I came over from a big, big company. And I worked with QlikView, and now known as Qlik, and we, you know, I got pretty good with that. And I was very comfortable with that tool. And when I moved over to
Brick Thompson:He's being modest.
Caleb Ochs:Well, I don't know, those were those early reports, I don't even want to look at them anymore. But it was when I moved over to Blue Margin, I had to learn Power BI, and I gotta say, it was pretty frustrating at first.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I mean, those early versions were rough. I mean, they worked, but they were sort of minimum viable products.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah. So with with QlikView, when I was developing in there, the sky's the limit on things you can customize, and you know, the navigation in the UI, and you had all kinds of options. And then Power BI, that was back in 2016 when I made the jump, it was so immature, it just felt like you were just tied so far down. And eventually, you know, as the years went on, Microsoft - to their credit - they invested a lot into the power stack, and Power BI being the primary one.
Brick Thompson:Well, that was amazing, because I remember Power BI coming out and sort of being a little bit disappointed, because I was looking forward to it. But then they'd had a release cadence that was monthly. I mean, on the dot for several years. They didn't miss a monthly release and...
Caleb Ochs:Still doing it.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I know. I think they've had a couple of missed months, but most mostly every month. Yeah, I think so. I could be wrong about that. But the editions each month were significant. It was sort of like getting a present every month for you know, for someone who's building reports. It was fantastic.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, I remember we had a ticket or not a ticket, there was a place that you can, you can vote for features to be in the release. And we had this what seemed like such an easy thing to do putting little KPIs in your tables and stuff. Little green checkmarks in line in your tables. You can do that in Excel. You, I don't know... ever since I've used Excel, you can do that. And I remember just month after month would go by and it's like nope, nope, nope. Good news is it's there now.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, yeah. And we did some crazy workarounds to deal with some of that stuff.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, created a Power Pivot model in Excel first, and then we moved it over into Power BI with the migration. And that worked. And...
Brick Thompson:I don't... I guess I'm not close enough to your team now to know, but do we have crazy workarounds we do now? Or have they solved all those?
Caleb Ochs:Most of the things that we've had to solve with crazy workarounds, have gone. Not to say that there's not still some edge cases where we need to do some interesting stuff, but for the usual suspects have all been solved.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. Let me put you on the spot. Can you think of any recent improvements that have really blown your mind?
Caleb Ochs:Well so, the Microsoft conference was just a few months ago, and they released this thing they called Data Marts. We touched on it a little bit in an earlier episode. That looks like a game changer. I mean, it's really cool. So basically, what it allows you to do is, you can take a model that's in Power BI, so you've got some data up there. And you can tell Power BI to spin up another database in Azure, that would house the data model's data, and then you can do additional transformations on it. So it takes the processing load off of, let's say you've got a giant, complex, really, really slow or you got a data warehouse that's not great. (We don't build those, by the way.)
Brick Thompson:Right.
Caleb Ochs:But you can take your model and you can create this Data Mart and then do some additional things to it from there. So it kind of opens the door for additional data processing that you wouldn't have to - let's say you work in a big company - you wouldn't have to go to the data warehouse team to fix, or to add, or to do something like that. So you can... it gives you a little bit more control. It's a really cool tool that I'm sure we'll be using for some of our clients.
Brick Thompson:And those data marts exist in the Power BI cloud, is that right?
Caleb Ochs:Right, right. I'm sure it spins up in Azure SQL Database. I haven't looked at the technical stuff. It's still in preview. So we're/the team's looking at it, but it looks exciting.
Brick Thompson:Oh, that's great. That sounds like a good one. So I think one of the things one of us said early on in this discussion was your best if you're with Power BI, if you're pairing with Azure, Microsoft's cloud. What if your data warehouse is sitting on AWS or Google Cloud?
Caleb Ochs:So as as with everything in IT. It depends.
Brick Thompson:Yeah.
Caleb Ochs:But so let's say that your data warehouse is in AWS, and it's sitting on a on a Windows machine on SQL Server. Power BI would still work pretty well with that. You do lose some of the benefits of having like an Azure SQL Database, or Azure Synapse in Azure with that. So, for example, you would have to take your machine and join it to your AD or something, if you wanted to have that single sign-on type experience, or use Windows Authentication. So you don't get quite the seamlessness of it. But let's say that your data is in Amazon, and it's on Redshift, or it's in BigQuery, or something on Google. Power BI will still work with that, and it will work pretty well with it. But then the case just becomes not quite as clear. So if you'd say that your company has a ton of money to spend on this, and somebody really loves Tableau, and you're using BigQuery... sure, why not? But you know, what we typically find is that people still want that lower barrier, they don't want to bite off a bunch for Tableau licenses, or servers, or things like that. And they'll still use Power BI to connect to Google BigQuery, or Redshift or something like that.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that comes up a lot in BI is self-serve BI. Self-service. Allowing the business user to be able to create their own reports. I remember early in my career - early 90s - when everybody was excited that "Oh, business people can use SQL to do their own queries and create their own reports. It's going to be self-service." And most business executives did not adopt that. It actually never materialized. And I think we've seen not the same but but a similar dynamic with Power BI. Where I think that we're all hoping that it gets to a point where it's easy self-service. The reality is that it's a great tool for all business users to use, to be able to view reports, and to slice them, and cross filter, and do all that cool stuff. And it's very easy then to edit and change the report and get it the way you want. But I'm not seeing business executives do that and very much.
Caleb Ochs:Well, here's the thing about business executives.
Brick Thompson:Why are you looking at me?
Caleb Ochs:There, you know, they're not very patient.
Brick Thompson:No.
Caleb Ochs:And for good reason, right? They don't want to have to spend their time doing that. And so I... So just this morning (this is just a fresh example) I was playing around with Power BI's Q&A feature. And I was trying to put something together that was kind of cool. And that thing just would not get my question right. I typed in my question. And it seemed very straightforward, and it was giving me the wrong result.
Brick Thompson:What was your question?
Caleb Ochs:It was... I wanted to know how many deals were in each stage. For example, for like a CRM. And it kept bringing back activities. And it wouldn't give me the count of deals. It would give me the deals and how many activities were against each deal. And I just gave up. It's not even worth getting this thing. Right. So...
Brick Thompson:I'm shocked to hear you gave up.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, I mean, I could have kept going. But I was like, "Yeah, I'm just not even gonna use this."
Brick Thompson:So you just went ahead and coded the measure yourself and got the number you wanted?
Caleb Ochs:Right, right. So you know, you it's just impatience, right? So that's the problem with self-service, in my opinion, is that, while you can do some stuff, you're gonna keep, you're gonna hit your limit on like, how much you want to keep learning about this thing to do everything you want to do.
Brick Thompson:Yeah.
Caleb Ochs:Right. So it doesn't matter what the tool is. It can be as simple as typing in a question. If you don't get the right result, you're not gonna sit there and troubleshoot it.
Brick Thompson:It only takes you once or twice of that. Yeah, so, in your view, this is not really a knock on Power BI, but rather just the idea of self-service BI is maybe not quite there yet, in terms of the tools.
Caleb Ochs:I think so. You know, that's my opinion. And I think it really depends on your company, as well. Like if you have analysts sitting in your departments, and they're you know, sitting there cranking out reports, and they have the time to learn the tool and that type of thing. But then could you argue that that's not really self-service at that point?
Brick Thompson:Yeah.
Caleb Ochs:And you just have a developer building reports again, right. So if you're thinking of self-service as you want the departments to build their own stuff. Sure, that's there. Yeah, that's been there with SQL. With Excel, right? That's all over the place. But to have to really think that your executives and your business users that don't do this are going to pick it up, and be able to run with it. I think we're still a ways out.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. And I want to be clear, what we're talking about here is actual development of reports. The executives, at least for our customers, we have hundreds of them that use the reports every day and use Power BI extensively.
Caleb Ochs:Right, you build a good report, you can give the business user, you can answer every question they have.
Brick Thompson:Right because you put all sorts of filters, and slicers, and cross filters, and different paths, and drillthroughs...
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, it's enjoyable for them. They're getting their answers. The data is right there. It's presented the right way. They don't have to choose the right chart, for example, it's just there. And that speaks to effective report design, which is often overlooked, and maybe we'll have an episode about that.
Brick Thompson:I'm sure we will. Alright, so our topic today has been why Power BI? I'll just put you on the spot... If money is no object - and you said a lot of nice things about Qlik - would you go Qlik, Tableau, Power BI?
Caleb Ochs:No. I would go Power BI. I would not go Qlik. I would not go Tableau. Power BI all day. Power BI Premium.
Brick Thompson:Okay, I think that sums it up nicely. All right. Well, I think that's about it. Thank you, Caleb. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks Brick. All right. Talk to you soon.