Having the right course and navigating it as efficiently as possible is crucial for a healthy company. To guarantee that you are taking the right course, it is important to uncover the wrong assumptions and invisible wastes in time.
For example, an overly rosy expectation of your customer satisfaction or an underestimated (in) direct cost of your product. Insight into these kinds of misconceptions can be achieved by working in a more data-driven way. In addition to the right people and processes, this also requires the right technology. In this blog, we delve deeper into our choice of technology for the Microsoft tools Synapse (Azure Synapse Analytics) and Power BI. Perhaps this is also something for your company to support your decisions quickly and at a relatively low cost with concrete insights from your data. For example, dashboards to quickly analyze your profit & loss, customer satisfaction or operational processes top-down. But that's just a start; it allows you to perform more complex analyses with AI, machine learning, and custom scripts. A good foundation for starting out as simple as tackling more complex issues.
Synapse is a Microsoft analytics platform with options for, among other things, ETL, data integration, data warehousing and more (big) data analytics services. Power BI is one of Microsoft's most popular data visualization tools.
Of course, the criteria for choosing technology can be different for each company. However, we often hear the criteria in the headings below from our customers. For each cup, we briefly describe why Synapse in combination with Power BI score well on these criteria.
Costs
The pricing model must match the customer's data maturity. So no high licensing costs or high start-up costs, so the threshold for getting started is low. For around €150 per month, these packages can already be used. That immediately makes it interesting to use or experiment with.
Synapse costs consist of two parts, namely your computing power consumed and your storage. Synapse uses a pay-per-use model where you pay per hour. So if you use 12 hours of computing power per month, you only pay for 12 hours. To store data, you use so-called “blob storage”; this is a cheap form of data storage compared to traditional database storage. When it comes to computing power, you can choose from more than 10 levels, where a higher level has more computing power and therefore performs the tasks faster.
Bee Power BI you have the choice to pay per user. Within that, you can choose between a free version, a Pro and a Premium version. The (most comprehensive) premium version comes down to 20 euro per user per month. In practice, the Pro version is usually sufficient and you pay 10 euro per user per month.
Integration with existing systems
If you want to do more with data, you will undoubtedly want to extract data from your existing systems. Then it is very useful that you can easily connect the tool that unlocks the data to these systems.
Inside Synapse By default, many connectors are available to connect to your source systems. Whether it's an Azure or AWS database, a web service or a separate document, a connector exists as standard for the majority of use cases. Unlocking data can therefore be done without too much effort.
Level of maintenance required
We notice that customers prefer a system that requires little maintenance. After all, in many cases, there is no army of IT professionals available.
Synapse is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. This means that many things such as platform updates and database management are carried out automatically by Microsoft. You have to do things like performance management, managing environments, scaling resources, etc. yourself. In practice, this will only amount to a few hours per month in small environments.
Completeness of functionalities
The basic functionalities for unlocking, transforming, loading and visualizing data must be supported. In addition, it is often not necessary to be able to do it all in one tool, but it is useful if the different tools get along well.
Synapse is an all-in-one solution that includes data loading, storage and analysis functionality. So you don't need a separate data transfer (ETL) tool. This is not only user-friendly, but it also keeps your IT landscape simpler. In addition, the solution is often updated with new features. With Synapse you are also well prepared for more advanced analytics use cases. This is because it offers various machine learning and IoT services. In addition, it works (not entirely surprisingly) well in combination with Microsoft Power BI. Once you have the data ready in your data lake or data warehouse, it's a piece of cake to retrieve the data with Power BI.
All in all, the combination of Synapse and Power BI ideal for both organizations that want to start with data and organizations that already have an extensive data landscape. Do you also want more insight into your data within your organization, in order to make better informed decisions? Feel free to contact us to see which steps suit your company.
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