This year at KTL’s empower the User Conference one of the hottest topics was Microsoft’s Power BI. No surprise here after it was one of the most popular categories at Microsoft Dynamic’s Convergence back in March.
For those who haven’t heard of Power BI before here is a short synopsis. Power BI is an excel add-in tool made up of 4 components: Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Map. Power Pivot and Query are used for data preparation while power view and map are used for data visualization. These tools can take large amounts of data from virtually any system and harness it for real-time, powerful analytics. One of the huge differentiators of Power BI from other analytics tools is that you can combine resources from multiple data centers. Typically, when people want to see the profitability of an organization they look at the financial data. However, this is not always the only factor, especially in today’s world that is driven by technology and social media.
At KTL’s Annual User Conference, Barry Crowell demonstrated this during his Power BI demo. Barry took KTL’s blog data and combined it with sales data to see if there was any correlation. It showed that when blogs activity was higher sales revenue was up and vice versa. Also, it showed an even deeper correlation of when individual sales reps blogs were being read more, the reps were making and exceeding their sales goals for that month/quarter. Session attendees (including a few KTL employees) were astounded to hear that. However, it makes great sense. When clients and prospects are actively reading KTL material they are more inclined to contact KTL and use them for their technology needs. These are the kinds of analytics that companies needs to be looking at in order to better assess the profitability of their company and their employees.
All too often we get bogged down looking at the assets and liabilities on a balance sheet and not the other things that make up the true value of a company. What is your social media presence? How much are employees contributing to the branding of the company? What industries are you most known in? Are you well known in your local community? This information is just as vital as how much a company profited the year before. This is how you measure growth in today’s world. Sure a company could have profited $100 million the year before and their stock is way up, but what if you take a deeper look and see that from October-February they lost 10k twitter followers. Take that and compare it against the financial data and you have real analytics that can show you what is really happening in a company and they may just help you turn things around and make better business decisions.
Power BI takes all these data sets and presents them in a visual and dynamics way where they make sense and actually mean something to the people analyzing them. Barry’s presentation was very clear, Power BI is the future of data analytics.
Want to learn more about Power BI from either our BI Architect or our business development team? Contact 301.360.0001
MARY CHARUHAS | Business Development
Mary Charuhas has been with KTL since 2013, starting as a sales intern in the summer of 2013 and moving to Business Development and Internal Sales in the spring of 2014. She is currently pursuing her Associates Degree in Business Management from Frederick Community College and hopes to continue her education at the University of Maryland next spring. Mary also possesses several Microsoft Dynamics and Acumatica Cloud ERP Sales certifications. Mary assists the sales team in finding new and exciting opportunities. She also manages KTL’s existing customers through providing them with ongoing knowledge of the products, assisting them with upgrades and continuing projects, keeping them informed about updates/new releases, events, and training opportunities. Her charisma and passion for providing excellent customer service make her a valuable asset to KTL’s sales department.
