All businesses generate data. Gaining actionable insights from that data is what separates successful businesses from those that flounder.

Every business generates data -- transaction data, marketing data, customer data. The problem most businesses face is not capturing or storing the data, but doing something relevant with that data. Business intelligence (BI) tools offer a way to unlock the insights burried in disparate databases, systems, tools, and spreadsheets. By allowing users to effectively manipulate and present data to end users, BI tools offer a means to derive value from the bounty of data being generated by your business.

Microsoft PowerBI is a business intelligence and reporting tool built for this purpose. Available in two flavors -- Desktop and Cloud -- PowerBI provides multiple ways to connect to data sources, combine data sets, shape and transform data, and ultimately present that data to users in a visual and intuitive fashion. Through a combination of report "cards," Dashboards, Data Sets, and tables, PowerBI affords users an easy to use tool kit for digging deep into the insights burried within your data.

GRAYBOX likes a jack of all trades, and PowerBI fits that well. Versatility is really important when working with data, and Microsoft has done an exceptional job of providing multiple ways of achieving your reporting and intelligence needs in PowerBI. GRAYBOX has chosen PowerBi as our own in-house Reporting tool, in large part because of the flexible ways in which we can access data from multiple systems. The combination of both a Desktop and Cloud version facilitates a number of workflows and connection types. Businesses can pull data from an AWS Redshift database, combined with a MySQL Database on AWS, a MySQL database on Azure, CRM data from Salesforce.com, and website traffic data from Google Analytics, and mesh all that data together in a single set of reports and dashboards using PowerBI. The results can be published to users in the Cloud -- allowing permission controlled access to just the data you need and want.

PowerBI is a great fit for companies that know data is important, and have the time to dig deep on insights, but haven't ventured far into data in the past. PowerBI is flexible and intuitive, but requires a little technical knowledge to really excel. Understanding database tables and structures, and a basic knowledge of SQL or other query language, can really give the user a leg up. While PowerBI doesn't require a data scientist to strategize, there is some notion of "plan before you report" that's required to ensure the results are meaningful, and the data sets are sufficiently flexible to support ad hoc requiests that are bound to arise in the future.

GRAYBOX really likes working with PowerBI. Aside from using the tool for our own business reporting needs, we've leveraged it for other clients to evaluate accounting and financial data, inventory velocity, sales data, and a host of other topics. Because of the flexibility the tool provides, PowerBI can fit nicely in a number of projects, either as a primary source of utility, or as an ancillary tool that helps validate and inform based on the data being generated from other core systems.