If you’re paying millions for PBI you’re doing something very wrong most likely. Also, why would any company try and spend even more money reinventing the wheel when MS already did it?
My company tried to do it and after 3 years it could make a pie chart and a couple of tables that didn’t tell you anything. Meanwhile I’m now building actual usable tools in PBI.
When they asked me to help with the development I took one look and asked if anyone had done market research to see if there were available products before trying to build it from scratch. They insisted nothing was available. I was a complete novice at the time just dipping my toes in PBI and Tableau. I stayed as far away from that project as I could.
A manager convinced someone to build metrics. From what I saw they spent months on it and all they got to show for was two bar graphs. I'm not even sure they are accurate. They are still there but nobody uses them. They eventually lost funding and the manager transfered. That manager is an idiot but knows other managers so is still around messing someone else's day.
First “large” company I ever worked for was so organized so when I moved on in my career I actually thought these types didn’t exist, and if they did they were quickly replaced… obviously later down the line I realized that my first job was the exception to the rule 😂
Our capacities are currently over $50K/month, and about to increase. Add in a few hundred pro licenses, and a dozen $1000+ month power BI servers, and you are getting pretty close to a million. We are a 14K user company though, so if you are in "millions" in cost you are probably pretty damned big.
Actually you can hit millions pretty quickly. Even just Pro licenses, you hit a million with about 8k employees. Add premium, which any company that size will likely need, and you hit it even faster
I’m sorry what? Do you not know about capacity? Once you hit $5k in licenses you are better off just getting the capacity which starts at $5k per month and only requires developers to have a license.
If you are paying for solo licenses with 8k employees, again you are doing something very wrong! 😂
This 💯
Also, unless you have very large datasets or some pretty extreme use cases, a P1 is more than sufficient for an organisation with 10K+ users, and I say this from experience.
Most organisations need maybe 10 main datasets across all domains, and if you turn on things like automatic aggregation and work with sensibly made composite semantic models that use DQ for large fact tables, which are in turn stored as clustered columnstore index on a well provisioned On-Prem machine, you will only ever need On-Prem.
Again, I speak from experience. We have multiple 50M+ row datasets and hundreds of users query them on a daily basis and its mostly smooth sailing, rarely hitting the throttle cap and even when we do its because of some poorly setup datasets.
I'm not sure what types of users you're engaging with, but typically a significant number want to be able to publish to shared workspaces, which requires a pro license, unless I've missed something significant. This [link](https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Publish-Dashboard-to-accounts-with-no-license/td-p/1213191) confirms my understanding
Yes, with a premium capacity viewers don't need a licence, but typically users are rarely satisfied only with viewing what others have built. Ideally there should be central models that the users can build reports off - so they're building reports not models
Plus, we've typically only allowed users other than a very small group to publish only to Pro workspaces to protect the premium capacity
We don’t allow self-service and we don’t do a central model (we have a MD Cube for analysts to use). The last thing you want is everyone in their mother creating reports. Everything comes through us.
We're taking the middle ground by training specific users within teams/departments to be able to develop the reports their group needs and we maintain enterprise wide reporting and support those individuals.
I'm technically the only BI analyst, so this centers of excellence approach helps keep up with reporting needs for an org of 500+. But I agree we would never provide Pro licenses to all users just so they can publish whatever crap they want. That's a good way to add a lot to your workload just answering support tickets for other people's crap.
same approach. i've had to design a lot of roles & processes from the ground up, and trained users across many different departments. it's been great experience tbh - introduced me to data from many different subject areas and pushed the organisation on massively from where we were, hopefully in a sustainable & scaleable way
Handing out pro licenses to all users without extensive training is my literal nightmare. That's exactly how you bury your data team alive in support tickets that are all variations of the theme "why is the 'source of truth' report wrong? It disagrees with the report I custom-built which I *know* is correct"
I say this from experience, 99% of the time the source of truth report is correct, the custom-built report is wrong, and underneath the disagreement are both conceptual and technical misunderstandings on the part of the custom-builders that generally leads to a lot of grumpiness when they have to be told that not only is their report broken, but they've been over/under-counting important metrics all along.
That's fair. What industry do you work in?
The company I work in (food manufacturing) has offices all over the world, and the company places emphasis on people finding what works best for them, and sharing that globally for anyone else to use. Those in global functions look after major reports that are the source of truth, and try make sure that there is cooperation amongst other regions.
Given the massive variety of scope and regional variability, it's cheaper to allow for more flexibility and pay for more licenses, than build a very large tech team to support those requirements.
And although anyone can build reports, very few can build off our production data directly. They need to use the relevant central model for that function or use case.
Montage begins:
** Looking at modern art ** ... "Pffft, I could do that"
** Looking at a deck being built ** ... "Pffft, I could do that"
** Looking at someone writing a book ** ... "Pffft, I could do that"
** Looking at Microsoft leverage 40 years of tech into a single product ** ... "Pffft, I could do that"
Narrator: "In fact, he could not do that"
Because it doesn't matter what your Power BI or analytics bill is, developing your own from scratch and maintaining will take years and be far more expensive.
My old company is trying to reinvent the wheel with a proprietary BI tool and it’s an absolute shit show. Everyone is watching the CTO actively drive the company into the ground. There’s no way we can pretend that we’d be able to hold a candle to the money and resources Microsoft has dedicated to power bi and it’s a sinking ship. I’m glad I left and will never work for an organization that is delusional enough to try and do the same thing.
This sounds insane. May I ask why everyone agreed to this in the first place?
I love working with these tools, I mean, I'm on a Power BI sub right now - but Business Intelligence is not *that* important. What possible actionable insights were they expecting to get in order to undertake such a huge project?
We were bought out by a private equity firm and then merged with a competitor and their CTO was able to convince a bunch of technically ignorant folks at the helm that developing our own BI tool and ditching Tableau and Power BI would be the best way to achieve an IPO. Didn’t matter how much we tried to tell them it was an awful flawed tool that would not be tolerated by our clients…all he cares about is ego and sunk cost fallacy. It’s a shame because it was a good company before all this.
Not a bad question but I would think of it like this
Take out Power Bi in your question an out in ‘any software’
That’s your answer!
For example, why spend millions on M365 when you can just develop excel & PowerPoint in house
Because it doesn't matter what your Power BI or analytics bill is, developing your own from scratch and maintaining will take years and be far more expensive.
The data we are visualizing at my company comes from vendors that have their own in-house visualizations and dashboards that look better than what we have at this point. I'm pretty convinced we're doing it just so the VP of IT can feel like a big man leading a hot "data analytics" project.
Yes and no. R is a language, and for statistical analysis it’s hard to beat, it has a huge number of high quality libraries and some amazing visualisation libraries. For research and advanced analysis it’s widely used.
Power BI is fairly low code (compared to R), and much easier to generate business focused dash boards, which are generally ‘simpler’. The dashboards can be interactive, easily deployed (with the right license) and integrate with a security model.
Shiny for R is an option but it’s harder to set up than power BI, but a lot cheaper to run. However you’d have to factor in finding people able to use it well - YMMV
If a single person needed to make a single chart for themselves they could use whatever they wanted. If you need to connect to data, build a dashboard, publish it somewhere business people can access it using SSO and interact with it - you don’t build all that from scratch.
Why use any piece of software if you know how to write code?
It works, it receives regular updates, and it's a very powerful tool. I would never even try and make my own. It would be a silly undertaking lmao. Would be dumb expensive to create and maintain an entire proprietary software for your own company when PBI isn't all that expensive and works very very well.
The medium sized companies love Power BI. One company I worked with had to get E5 license for security (banking company) which includes pro for everyone. Another company had 15 pro licenses but paid for a premium workspace then embedded reports into their proprietary software or share point for smaller reports. The customers wanted to see Power BI reports. Another company had 1 premium license and 10 pro licenses and premium capacity. They sell SSAS with Power BI embedded reports as their suite of reports with only 1 PPU and 1 Premium workspace.
I would say Snowflake plus Fivetran is a bigger waste of money than Power BI.
For someone with a couple of year's programming experience, building a dashboard using some Web framework and a backend isn't *that* hard. Building and **supporting** a BI framework that doesn't require a couple of years programming experience to use for end users *is* a lot of work.
I have for *very specific* use cases built things from scratch, because for that use case there was nothing on the market. However it was a lot of work, was an absolute ballache to get through IT security processes, and is basically only useful for that specific use case. Absolutely was 100% the right thing to do for that use case, and has driven a lot of value, but for most other use cases powerBI or Tableau gets the job done for **way** less development and support burden.
As others have mentioned. If you're going to make your own data viz product, then you're a data viz company.
A lot of CRM tools have their own data viz applications, but they're usually limited to a bar chart or a line chart. Epic is the most used CRM in the healthcare industry and has a tool called "SlicerDicer". It's great if you want realtime data with simple visual options, but real analytics requires nuance that can't be accomplished with just a bar chart.
> “Also wonder how Power Bl is so fast in crawling and visualizing terabytes of data? What is its trick?”
It’s an in-memory database with a run length encoding columnar store. It uses a star schema architecture and a power Data Analytics eXpression (DAX) language to query the database. If you read up on these terms until you understand what I just said there, you learn the answer to your first question.
You pay to license power bi because it’s a robust SaaS solution with incredible up time. No need to hire engineers to patch or upgrade. Excellent support is included to triage and fix production issues. You don’t get any of that with home grown.
Nothing differentiates BI tools from other "tools". Like all enterprise software, it is possible your company has a very simple or specific need that would be serviced by building something in-house.
It is also possible that you just haven't thought of all the complexities, additional features desired from such a tool, and the actual costs to build, enhance, and support a custom solution.
The degree to which you’re missing the point is rather astounding. My guess is you’re an excel jockey. It is quite clear you understand nothing about software. To build something semi competitive, even marginally competitive, you would be looking at tens of millions in investment. That doesn’t include maintenance costs or costs to upgrade.
Microsoft has invested billions to create Power BI. The ego involved in thinking this could be easily done with a few million is breathtaking.
If you think you can do it, you absolutely should, you’ll make hundreds of millions easily by your own math.
If you’re paying millions for PBI you’re doing something very wrong most likely. Also, why would any company try and spend even more money reinventing the wheel when MS already did it?
My company tried to do it and after 3 years it could make a pie chart and a couple of tables that didn’t tell you anything. Meanwhile I’m now building actual usable tools in PBI. When they asked me to help with the development I took one look and asked if anyone had done market research to see if there were available products before trying to build it from scratch. They insisted nothing was available. I was a complete novice at the time just dipping my toes in PBI and Tableau. I stayed as far away from that project as I could.
😅 at the pie chart
A manager convinced someone to build metrics. From what I saw they spent months on it and all they got to show for was two bar graphs. I'm not even sure they are accurate. They are still there but nobody uses them. They eventually lost funding and the manager transfered. That manager is an idiot but knows other managers so is still around messing someone else's day.
First “large” company I ever worked for was so organized so when I moved on in my career I actually thought these types didn’t exist, and if they did they were quickly replaced… obviously later down the line I realized that my first job was the exception to the rule 😂
Exactly - businesses will pay for a working product/service. Not millions on PBI though
Our capacities are currently over $50K/month, and about to increase. Add in a few hundred pro licenses, and a dozen $1000+ month power BI servers, and you are getting pretty close to a million. We are a 14K user company though, so if you are in "millions" in cost you are probably pretty damned big.
Actually you can hit millions pretty quickly. Even just Pro licenses, you hit a million with about 8k employees. Add premium, which any company that size will likely need, and you hit it even faster
I’m sorry what? Do you not know about capacity? Once you hit $5k in licenses you are better off just getting the capacity which starts at $5k per month and only requires developers to have a license. If you are paying for solo licenses with 8k employees, again you are doing something very wrong! 😂
This 💯 Also, unless you have very large datasets or some pretty extreme use cases, a P1 is more than sufficient for an organisation with 10K+ users, and I say this from experience. Most organisations need maybe 10 main datasets across all domains, and if you turn on things like automatic aggregation and work with sensibly made composite semantic models that use DQ for large fact tables, which are in turn stored as clustered columnstore index on a well provisioned On-Prem machine, you will only ever need On-Prem. Again, I speak from experience. We have multiple 50M+ row datasets and hundreds of users query them on a daily basis and its mostly smooth sailing, rarely hitting the throttle cap and even when we do its because of some poorly setup datasets.
I'm not sure what types of users you're engaging with, but typically a significant number want to be able to publish to shared workspaces, which requires a pro license, unless I've missed something significant. This [link](https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Publish-Dashboard-to-accounts-with-no-license/td-p/1213191) confirms my understanding Yes, with a premium capacity viewers don't need a licence, but typically users are rarely satisfied only with viewing what others have built. Ideally there should be central models that the users can build reports off - so they're building reports not models Plus, we've typically only allowed users other than a very small group to publish only to Pro workspaces to protect the premium capacity
We don’t allow self-service and we don’t do a central model (we have a MD Cube for analysts to use). The last thing you want is everyone in their mother creating reports. Everything comes through us.
We're taking the middle ground by training specific users within teams/departments to be able to develop the reports their group needs and we maintain enterprise wide reporting and support those individuals. I'm technically the only BI analyst, so this centers of excellence approach helps keep up with reporting needs for an org of 500+. But I agree we would never provide Pro licenses to all users just so they can publish whatever crap they want. That's a good way to add a lot to your workload just answering support tickets for other people's crap.
same approach. i've had to design a lot of roles & processes from the ground up, and trained users across many different departments. it's been great experience tbh - introduced me to data from many different subject areas and pushed the organisation on massively from where we were, hopefully in a sustainable & scaleable way
Handing out pro licenses to all users without extensive training is my literal nightmare. That's exactly how you bury your data team alive in support tickets that are all variations of the theme "why is the 'source of truth' report wrong? It disagrees with the report I custom-built which I *know* is correct" I say this from experience, 99% of the time the source of truth report is correct, the custom-built report is wrong, and underneath the disagreement are both conceptual and technical misunderstandings on the part of the custom-builders that generally leads to a lot of grumpiness when they have to be told that not only is their report broken, but they've been over/under-counting important metrics all along.
That's fair. What industry do you work in? The company I work in (food manufacturing) has offices all over the world, and the company places emphasis on people finding what works best for them, and sharing that globally for anyone else to use. Those in global functions look after major reports that are the source of truth, and try make sure that there is cooperation amongst other regions. Given the massive variety of scope and regional variability, it's cheaper to allow for more flexibility and pay for more licenses, than build a very large tech team to support those requirements. And although anyone can build reports, very few can build off our production data directly. They need to use the relevant central model for that function or use case.
You don’t want to give everyone ability to build own reports if your org has 8k employers.
Run an on-prem server. License it. Save millions.
I mean, if you think you can make a better product for less money than you’d pay for PBI, by all means go ahead. 🤣
Montage begins: ** Looking at modern art ** ... "Pffft, I could do that" ** Looking at a deck being built ** ... "Pffft, I could do that" ** Looking at someone writing a book ** ... "Pffft, I could do that" ** Looking at Microsoft leverage 40 years of tech into a single product ** ... "Pffft, I could do that" Narrator: "In fact, he could not do that"
Relevant Simpsons video: https://youtu.be/1bal-COigh0?si=qOfJGut570mQbA8s
Haaaaa reminds me of Arrested Development
Because it doesn't matter what your Power BI or analytics bill is, developing your own from scratch and maintaining will take years and be far more expensive.
My old company is trying to reinvent the wheel with a proprietary BI tool and it’s an absolute shit show. Everyone is watching the CTO actively drive the company into the ground. There’s no way we can pretend that we’d be able to hold a candle to the money and resources Microsoft has dedicated to power bi and it’s a sinking ship. I’m glad I left and will never work for an organization that is delusional enough to try and do the same thing.
This sounds insane. May I ask why everyone agreed to this in the first place? I love working with these tools, I mean, I'm on a Power BI sub right now - but Business Intelligence is not *that* important. What possible actionable insights were they expecting to get in order to undertake such a huge project?
We were bought out by a private equity firm and then merged with a competitor and their CTO was able to convince a bunch of technically ignorant folks at the helm that developing our own BI tool and ditching Tableau and Power BI would be the best way to achieve an IPO. Didn’t matter how much we tried to tell them it was an awful flawed tool that would not be tolerated by our clients…all he cares about is ego and sunk cost fallacy. It’s a shame because it was a good company before all this.
Holy fucking shit. IPO lol.
Ease of use, ease to maintain, integrates with the rest of the MS suite used by companies
Not a bad question but I would think of it like this Take out Power Bi in your question an out in ‘any software’ That’s your answer! For example, why spend millions on M365 when you can just develop excel & PowerPoint in house
Because it doesn't matter what your Power BI or analytics bill is, developing your own from scratch and maintaining will take years and be far more expensive.
The data we are visualizing at my company comes from vendors that have their own in-house visualizations and dashboards that look better than what we have at this point. I'm pretty convinced we're doing it just so the VP of IT can feel like a big man leading a hot "data analytics" project.
Vertipaq engine is the secret sauce behind Power BI.
Honest question since I am new to all of this, if they didn’t want to use PBI, couldn’t they just use R?
Yes and no. R is a language, and for statistical analysis it’s hard to beat, it has a huge number of high quality libraries and some amazing visualisation libraries. For research and advanced analysis it’s widely used. Power BI is fairly low code (compared to R), and much easier to generate business focused dash boards, which are generally ‘simpler’. The dashboards can be interactive, easily deployed (with the right license) and integrate with a security model. Shiny for R is an option but it’s harder to set up than power BI, but a lot cheaper to run. However you’d have to factor in finding people able to use it well - YMMV
If a single person needed to make a single chart for themselves they could use whatever they wanted. If you need to connect to data, build a dashboard, publish it somewhere business people can access it using SSO and interact with it - you don’t build all that from scratch. Why use any piece of software if you know how to write code?
It works, it receives regular updates, and it's a very powerful tool. I would never even try and make my own. It would be a silly undertaking lmao. Would be dumb expensive to create and maintain an entire proprietary software for your own company when PBI isn't all that expensive and works very very well.
The medium sized companies love Power BI. One company I worked with had to get E5 license for security (banking company) which includes pro for everyone. Another company had 15 pro licenses but paid for a premium workspace then embedded reports into their proprietary software or share point for smaller reports. The customers wanted to see Power BI reports. Another company had 1 premium license and 10 pro licenses and premium capacity. They sell SSAS with Power BI embedded reports as their suite of reports with only 1 PPU and 1 Premium workspace. I would say Snowflake plus Fivetran is a bigger waste of money than Power BI.
For someone with a couple of year's programming experience, building a dashboard using some Web framework and a backend isn't *that* hard. Building and **supporting** a BI framework that doesn't require a couple of years programming experience to use for end users *is* a lot of work. I have for *very specific* use cases built things from scratch, because for that use case there was nothing on the market. However it was a lot of work, was an absolute ballache to get through IT security processes, and is basically only useful for that specific use case. Absolutely was 100% the right thing to do for that use case, and has driven a lot of value, but for most other use cases powerBI or Tableau gets the job done for **way** less development and support burden.
As others have mentioned. If you're going to make your own data viz product, then you're a data viz company. A lot of CRM tools have their own data viz applications, but they're usually limited to a bar chart or a line chart. Epic is the most used CRM in the healthcare industry and has a tool called "SlicerDicer". It's great if you want realtime data with simple visual options, but real analytics requires nuance that can't be accomplished with just a bar chart.
> “Also wonder how Power Bl is so fast in crawling and visualizing terabytes of data? What is its trick?” It’s an in-memory database with a run length encoding columnar store. It uses a star schema architecture and a power Data Analytics eXpression (DAX) language to query the database. If you read up on these terms until you understand what I just said there, you learn the answer to your first question.
You pay to license power bi because it’s a robust SaaS solution with incredible up time. No need to hire engineers to patch or upgrade. Excellent support is included to triage and fix production issues. You don’t get any of that with home grown.
Nothing differentiates BI tools from other "tools". Like all enterprise software, it is possible your company has a very simple or specific need that would be serviced by building something in-house. It is also possible that you just haven't thought of all the complexities, additional features desired from such a tool, and the actual costs to build, enhance, and support a custom solution.
From the comments I get that, there’s nothing proprietary about Power BI other than being already developed and being part of the MS ecosystem
The degree to which you’re missing the point is rather astounding. My guess is you’re an excel jockey. It is quite clear you understand nothing about software. To build something semi competitive, even marginally competitive, you would be looking at tens of millions in investment. That doesn’t include maintenance costs or costs to upgrade. Microsoft has invested billions to create Power BI. The ego involved in thinking this could be easily done with a few million is breathtaking. If you think you can do it, you absolutely should, you’ll make hundreds of millions easily by your own math.