As the world is scurrying toward reaching 175 Zettabytes of data by 2025, organizations have begun to acknowledge and comprehend the value of data visualization and business intelligence (BI) tools.
No wonder the combined market size of BI and analytics markets worldwide will reach $17.6 billion by 2024. As the market is now flooded with a plethora of BI and visualization tools, most enterprises find it challenging to choose which tools best suit their requirements.
While Tableau and Microsoft Power BI have emerged as the leading BI solutions in terms of features, robust security, and cloud-first functionality, many organizations are choosing to migrate from Tableau to Power BI, including 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
Power BI also offers unique AI-driven features that are enhancing the decision-making process for businesses, making it an attractive option for migration.
To understand how AI features in Power BI can further elevate your analytics, check out our blog on Power BI AI Features.
This blog will explore the advantages of a Tableau to Power BI migration, highlight the best practices of doing so, and talk about how we can help you smoothen this transition.
Power BI vs. Tableau: How does one outweigh the other?
Tableau has been a critical modern workplace reporting tool for many organizations. However, in recent times, owing to cost concerns, complex licensing, and non-standard industry reporting formats, customers are seeking to migrate to Microsoft Power BI as an alternative.
Indeed, Power BI enjoys features that provide this BI solution a visible edge over Tableau. Some of these include the following:
- Greater flexibility – One of the most significant advantages of Power BI over Tableau is that it does not require complex proprietary technology. Instead, it relies on natural language queries, R, DAX, and M, so organizations can enjoy simpler data preparation, custom visualizations, and greater flexibility.
- Out-of-the-box capabilities – Power BI’s out-of-the-box responsiveness allows users to access reports and dashboards on mobile in a simple, intuitive format. This also reduces development time and allows more flexible connectivity with third-party data systems.
- Integrations with the best of Microsoft – Since Power BI is an integral part of Microsoft’s Power suite of services, it enjoys seamless integration with a host of additional Microsoft solutions, including Office 365 and Azure Cloud.
- Pricing – Tableau’s creator license ($70/per user/month) that supports “prepare & wrangle data” costs significantly more than Power BI’s pro license at $10/user/month that supports development and dashboard viewing.
- Easy distribution of data – The Power BI pro services allow speedy and easy sharing of data, dashboards, and files via private networks, web browsers, and in the form of .PBIX files.
Migrating from Tableau to Power BI - Best Practices
- Audit the Tableau estate for a list of workbooks, projects, and other data sources.
- Always prioritize high traffic views and sources.
- Prioritize data types: coerce tabular or relational data sources into Power BI first, followed by adapting semi/unstructured sources for integration.
- Capitalize on Power BI’s powerful data modeling tool to combine different data sources from various locations and build relationships and transformations on them.
- Leverage key organizational resources and training to ensure change management and greater acceptance of Power BI as a new data analytics tool.
- Ensure data governance practices are well-defined and in place to reaffirm data quality, create roles, permissions, and hierarchies, and manage metadata and lineage.
How can Acuvate help you migrate Tableau reports to Power BI?
If you ask a traditional BI firm, “How much time does it take to migrate 100 Tableau reports to Power BI?” — their typical answer would be “X days for one report multiplied by 100 reports.”
With Power BI being a self-service analytics tool, adoption and transition time is significantly less. Here, a fitting partner like Acuvate, known for Decision Automation Excellence for Modern Enterprises, can do all the heavy-lifting — help you adopt a modern analytics solution with a comprehensive focus on data security and governance while allowing business users to create reports and dashboards independently.
Acuvate’s robust approach to Power BI Migration:
1. Assessment using Acuvate’s automated API-based rapid assessment framework to identify and prioritize based on:
- High business value Tableau reports – reports used by executives.
- Reports that have a relational data model, which can be migrated as is from Tableau to Power BI.
- Reports that are critical for the business’ day-to-day operations.
2. Report factory approach with continuous integration and deployment
Acuvate helps to build a compelling business case for migration and leads clients through the decision-making process.
Our architects would work with your technical team to define the implementation strategy and on-design decisions like:
- Hosting the Power BI reporting services online or on-premises based on your requirements and constraints.
- Type of Power BI licenses you would need to have an optimal cost structure.
- The difference in import vs. direct query vs. live connection vs. composite models.
- Opening reports to external users.
- Power BI Admin setup that adheres to your reporting and governance standards.
Since Tableau to Power Bi migration would also need a culture change in adopting the new technology, Acuvate helps with your change management process.
- Stop all new development in Tableau and ensure all reports are built in Power BI.
- Turn off reports that are not being used.
- Educating and getting the business users excited through a “Power BI in a day” workshop where they would build reports they would use.
- Help them understand and differentiate operational vs. Analytical data and the basics of data Modeling.
- Having support teams in place when there are roadblocks.
- Turn off reports not used in the last three months. Migrate to Power BI.
- Develop the Power BI community within the organization through various forums and identify champions.
- Skill up your technical team with Advanced workshops on Power BI.
To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our Power BI migration experts.
Additionally, for a seamless and secure migration experience, explore Optimum – Acuvate’s intelligent migration platform that ensures your enterprise’s data migration is efficient, scalable, and future-ready
