I use this for its analysis service.
I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it.
Every tool has room for improvement. Microsoft also has a lot of room for improvement. If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users.
I've used this for eight years. I've used this solution within the last 12 months.
This solution is stable. It's a nice solution to have.
This solution is very much scalable.
Technical support is good. It's not really very helpful sometimes, but it is good.
We previously used a different solution for a different location, a different customer. If a customer decides to go for one vendor, they stick to that vendor, so changing a vendor is not an option most of the time.
Initial setup is straightforward, but it depends on the business case. It's straightforward, but sometimes it is complex, but compared to any other tool, the setup for this solution is straightforward.
My experience with them is okay.
I wasn't able to evaluate other options before choosing because it was already chosen by the customer.
Deployment for this solution in our organization is mixed: on-premise and through Microsoft cloud.
If you have a source on the Microsoft side then it's always easier to use one vendor for end-to-end solution. Even if there are some other sources, Microsoft has a big and varied area. Take the reporting ETL analysis as an example, everything's built as part Microsoft. It's always good to have one vendor than multiple vendors.
How long deployment of this solution takes all depends on how much data you have. Sometimes it takes a long time if you have a billion rows of data e.g. it could take hours. It also depends on the architecture. It depends on so many things.
There are a hundred users of this solution in our organization. The real users are customers who require reporting to make business decisions. Mostly the users are business analysts.
This solution is pretty much automated, so no maintenance. For AD, some are there as a team, so they help.
No plans of increasing usage of this solution. Maybe in the future, but not right now.
My advice to other people looking into implementing Power BI is to go for it. It's one tool that has everything, and they should always try to evaluate Microsoft compared to open source. Like in open source, you'll always have a lot of libraries, a lot of different tools that you would be using. It's great to try Microsoft Suite because at the end, you'll only have to deal with one vendor so maintenance will be less.
The lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is to try it out. Don't just rely on the features and promises about the solution. You first try it out, then share your experiences with the customer.
My rating for this solution would be seven or eight out of ten because it has everything in it and I don't see anything missing in it. It is efficient for our needs.