January 2019
“Who are JMP’s competitors? (maybe we have them in narrow areas)—but there is nothing else like it.
Who is as interactive?
Who else does as great a job at DOE?
Who does analysis faster and bigger on the desktop?
Who else does Graph Builder as well?
No one, because JMP is truly unique in the crowded marketplace.” -John Sall
Note: This is a first pass at a SWOT for Microsoft Power BI. We need to partner with the sales teams to provide feedback on this SWOT as conversations about JMP Live take place. Thanks in advance for the feedback.
Company
- Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Microsoft is also a JMP customer.
Product
- Microsoft Power BI was originally released in July 2015 and new features have frequently been added. Power BI Desktop is the Windows-based app for PCs for designing and publishing reports to Power BI Service, which is the SaaS-based online service. Other components include:
- Power BI Mobile Apps for Android, iOS, and Windows devices;
- Power BI Gateway to sync external data in and out of Power BI;
- Power BI Embedded where the REST API can be used to build dashboards and reports into custom apps that serve Power BI users;
- Power BI Report Server for on-premises reporting;
- Power BI Visuals Marketplace for custom visualizations and R-powered visualizations.
- A few highlights from the latest release:
- ArcGIS Maps for Power BI updates.
- Set tab order for objects on a page.
- Tooltips for button visuals.
- Live connect support for analytics Q&A (preview).
- Fuzzy merge support for top N matches.
Target Audience
- Primarily users and decision makers, but also developers to embed custom visuals and IT for support and to address data governance/security issues.
Feature Strength and JMP Response
- Unlimited access to on-premise and in-cloud data, including special data connectors (currently over 70) to streamline importing Salesforce, Google Analytics, and other sources.
- Share dashboards and reports with select people wherever you go. Alerts can notify you about updates or data changes, so you can take any necessary action.
- Extensive support and learning materials. Even though Power BI is easy to use, Microsoft has many tips, blog posts, video tutorials, and a massive user community available in addition to customer support. JMP too has extensive support materials and award-winning Tech Support who have an amazingly short average problem-resolution time.
- Low pricing. Even Gartner notes they are the low-priced incumbent in the latest magic quadrant: “License cost was the second most important reason for reference customers choosing Microsoft Power BI, with 12% of them citing this as a reason for selecting it.”
- Ease of use. Power BI has simple drag-and-drop gestures to identify trends and natural language queries to facilitate ease of use. JMP is also easy to use and though it is designed for scientists and engineers, using the statistics available in JMP does require some knowledge
- Data visualization capabilities. JMP also has extensive, easy-to-use exploratory data visualization as well as more specialized statistical data visualization.
Feature Weaknesses and JMP Response
- Though Power BI has some analytics, it doesn’t come close to what JMP has. If organizations really want to leverage their data, JMP and/or JMP Pro and JMP Live can take them to the next level.
- Lack of more complex data preparation capabilities. JMP has extensive, easy-to-use data prep.
Opportunities for JMP
- Our extensive sales expertise in meeting the needs of scientists and engineers.
- A more fully integrated solution that brings data visualization and analysis to a wide group of “specific-use” customers (i.e. DOE, Reliability, Consumer Research, etc.) with more functionality in just one product, including text analytics, functional data analysis, etc. These capabilities offer unique reports and visualizations to be shared via JMP Live.
- JMP has had solid growth and is part of SAS, also with solid growth over decades.
Threats for JMP
- Ease-of-use and very low pricing
- Even if Power BI is not deployed, many organizations already license it, so it may be viewed as the incumbent that we would have to make the case to displace.
- More mature messaging for IT than JMP currently has
Pricing
- Power BI is free (with a 1GB data capacity limit) allowing you to create, view and share dashboards/reports, publish to the web, and more.
- Power BI Pro is just $9.99/user/month which includes all Power BI features as well as the ability to consume live data sources, access on-premises data, collaborate with others, manage access control and sharing and shared queries.
Competitive references where we’ve won against them or displaced them.
