Is Power BI Ready for Enterprise Adoption?

Is Power BI Ready for the Enterprise?

As a long time business intelligence veteran, having led product teams at Business Objects (SAP), and Cognos (IBM), I have a strong appreciation for the intricate requirements large enterprise organizations have when it comes to Business Intelligence. With this context, I recently dug into the massive Power BI adoption in the past decade and surfaced several areas of weakness that are holding back Power BI’s ability to fully unseat some of the legacy BI products that are 25 years or older. I am excited with the mass adoption of Power BI and its future potential.

As some of you know, I got back into analytics earlier this year and joined eyko. To me eyko is doing something radically different in the data and analytics market. Most BI vendors start after the data is in a data warehouse. But the real market problem today is the vast amounts of data, variety of applications, and the disconnected nature of so many new business applications. Users are dealing with a data integration nightmare, beholding to I.T. and frustratingly waiting to the never-ending data warehouse project to load their latest new application data. eyko puts the power of data integration into the hands of the everyday user. Gone are the days of multiple tools, ETL scripts, SQL code, etc. eyko applies ML to unify, clean, enrich all your data so that you can quickly build reports and dashboards in minutes from any data source. eyko also embeds Power BI to deliver world class reporting and dashboards.

Enough about eyko for now…

I recently met with a large international organization that I once sold Cognos BI software to. They used Cognos as their standard BI product for years and I was surprised to hear they sunset Cognos in favour of Power BI. However, in this conversation they raised several enterprise adoption issues they wish Power BI could solve. This prompted me to do more research into the Power BI enterprise market adoption constraints.

Power BI in the Enterprise.

Power BI is quickly becoming the go-to tool for data analysis and visualization, kind of like how Excel became the default for spreadsheets. A lot of companies are now using Power BI as their standard tool, replacing older systems like IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects. It's super popular because it makes creating reports and dashboards easy. For analysts, it simplifies a lot of the manual work, and you don’t need to be super technical to pull insights from smaller data sets.

What’s cool is that Power BI Embedded has also come into play. This feature allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to embed Power BI’s analytics into their own applications. So, companies like us (eyko) can add advanced reporting features without having to build them from scratch. That’s a huge time-saver!

But even though Power BI is growing fast (with over 130K Reddit members and 2M people in LinkedIn groups), it still has its limitations, especially when it comes to bigger enterprises. As companies scale and deal with massive amounts of data from different systems, they need a tool that can handle consistent data definitions, hierarchies, and governance. Power BI does a good job for simpler use cases, but it struggles when things get more complex, especially with large data environments.

From discussions on Reddit and LinkedIn, there are several common issues that come up when companies try to use Power BI for their broader data and analytics strategies. While Power BI keeps improving, here are a few key areas where it’s still falling short, especially for big enterprises.

1. Multiple Data Sources, Volume, and Scale

Power BI lets you connect to a variety of data sources, but there’s a catch: you can only have one live database connection at a time. If you’re dealing with large, complex data systems that involve multiple sources—like cloud services, on-premises databases, ERP systems, or third-party apps—it can get tricky. Often, you have to do a lot of customization and prep work to bring everything together like long and over budget data warehouse projects. And as your data grows, you might notice slow loading times or delays when refreshing your reports. Power BI does offer connectors for different platforms, but getting everything into a single, real-time model or data warehouse—especially if you're pulling from ERP systems and other sources—can be a real headache. One may argue this isn't really a Power BI issue, but some BI tools on the market have had very lightweight data integration features to merge csv or Excel files to data coming from the underlying database. But if you are a user trying to merge multiple data sources, you still need to rely on I.T. or a data warehouse.

2. Complex Calculations

Power BI uses DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) for advanced calculations, which is powerful but not exactly user-friendly. If you’re not super technical, DAX can feel overwhelming. For those trying to work with large datasets or complex relationships between data, DAX expressions can quickly become more of a hassle than a help. This can limit how sophisticated your analytics models can get, which is a big deal for businesses needing in-depth financial reports. For example, if you're preparing financial data and need to consolidate multiple instances, standardize hierarchies, or run things like trailing 12-month filters, it can get pretty complicated with Power BI.

3. Hierarchies and Data Modeling

When you're working in a big company, having consistent hierarchies and data definitions is essential to make sure everything stays accurate across departments. Power BI’s options for building and managing hierarchies are a bit limited, especially when you need to drill down from high-level data into detailed insights. While it offers basic hierarchy functions, it's not great for handling more complex organizational structures or reporting needs. For example, if you're trying to drill from total costs down to individual expenses, it’s not as smooth as you’d want. The real issue stems from defining complex hierarchies that have different time periods or ragged structures.

4. Styling and Customization

Power BI is great at quickly creating visuals and reports, but when it comes to customizing those reports, it can be a bit frustrating. The options are somewhat limited compared to other tools. You might struggle if you’re trying to make highly customized, branded reports with specific layouts and styles. For businesses that need to follow strict branding guidelines, this lack of flexibility can be a dealbreaker. And it’s especially noticeable when you're trying to create financial reports with specific formatting, like bolds, underlines, double-underlines, and other layout details that are standard in accounting such as this report (built with eyko) that we will cover in future posts.

5. Printing and Exporting Reports

One of the most commonly mentioned frustrations with Power BI is its weak printing and exporting capabilities. While it's optimized for interactive, on-screen use, many companies still need printed reports or PDFs. Unfortunately, Power BI's printing and exporting options aren't great when it comes to controlling formatting. Reports often don’t look the same when printed as they do on screen, and exporting larger reports can be slow or lead to formatting issues, which makes sharing polished, professional reports with others tricky. I know that paginated reports in Power BI aim to address the export and printing limitations.

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In short, while Power BI is a fantastic tool for reporting and data visualization, it has some limitations when you’re trying to use it for large, enterprise-scale data sources and reporting. It especially struggles with handling multiple data sources (unless you want to build a data warehouse), complex calculations, and advanced data models. But stay tuned—our next articles will dive into some of these challenges and show how eyko is augmenting Power BI to help resolve some of these issues.

(This is the first article in a series that will explore the adoption of Power BI, it’s current shortcomings within the enterprise, and how eyko helps transform Power BI into an enterprise class Business Intelligence tool. This first post explores the current shortcomings in Power BI for enterprise grade deployments. Future posts will drill into each area and present how eyko transforms Power BI into an enterprise tool.)