Data tells it to express itself self and businesses of all sizes, right from startups to large companies, have recognized the power of data. Data within itself is of no value except it is investigated to derive actionable insights. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that several large organizations around the world have already invested heavily in big data and data analytics and have started seeing its positive business impact. Armed with relevant and real-time data, companies can make more informed decisions that can impact the company's bottom line. IDC divines that big data and business analytics incomes worldwide will increase from $122 billion in 2015 to higher than $187 billion in 2019.

Still, when it comes to startups and small businesses, they often do not have the time and budgets to invest in expensive Big Data and Analytics infrastructure or platforms. Executing BI tools is a task for startups typically due to its more license costs, set up of centralized data warehouse, and absence of BI experience. While they do consider the importance of data-driven business intelligence, they do not have the bandwidth to spend in Data Scientists or costly infrastructure. So what can the little businesses do to leverage the potential of big data? The answer is Microsoft Power BI. Microsoft Power BI provides startups and small businesses to collect, investigate, and visualize data to extract actionable insight. It serves companies to create rich dashboards by using the existing data sources. These dashboards can further be published on various devices. There are many other benefits, as posted below, of Power BI for startups.

Real-time Insights:

Applying Power BI, organizations can generate, view, and monitor various graphs, reports, trends,  etc. considering many aspects within the organization – all from a central location. It provides stakeholders with a broader view of the overall performance of several processes in the business. Many real-time alerts can be produced as a part of the dashboard, which can improve the management to recognize any problem areas and take proactive steps to alleviate the risks which are at a higher stake for a startup.

Ease of Use:

Another challenge that startups usually face is investing in training costs for sophisticated BI tools. In that mean, Power BI is a tool that can be easily used (and eventually mastered) by data analysts.  The reports and dashboards offer a straightforward interface allowing any business user to understand and explore the data. Still, with features like Power Pivot or Power BI Designer, advanced users can perform a robust analysis.

Data Aggregation:

Power BI enables startups to bring data from multiple data sources such as databases, files, and web services to collect and use it for analysis. Even non-technical users can aggregate data from various systems and analyze it through an individual application.

Visualizations:

Power BI has a big range of displays to show reports. These visualizations help to explain the data in several formats like bar charts, Pi-charts, etc. and enable the management in better decision-making and areas to focus. Since Power BI is now accessible as an open-source project on GitHub, it assists startups in creating high-quality custom visualizations with minimal investments quickly.

Ease of Integration:

Microsoft Power BI can be efficiently integrated with multiple Big Data sources to analyze and collect vast volumes of data. Power BI involves power Map and Power Query, which can be effortlessly combined with Big Data analytics applying Office 365 suite. Power Query benefits in improving the BI experience through its capacity to obtain the data in Microsoft Excel and further use it and break down as required.  As opposed, using Power Maps startups can plan geographic data and investigate it in a 3D design.