Migrating from Qlik to PowerBI- Feedback,experience etc.

[TheDataviz]

This question has been asked and answered in the past but without any helpful details. I am trying to ask this question hoping to get a detailed answer. 

Current Reporting  Envoirnment: Qlikview, Nprinting, SSRS

Data Source: SQL Datawarehouse feeding Qlikview which is failiry optimized to help Qlik to take off much of ETL load inside Qlik

We use the above tools and it has been developed couple of years back. Right now these are in maintance mode. We dont have a lot of active development. We are migrating to Azure and Office 365 E5 licenceing whihc includes PowerBI for all users of a small company. We have Qlik licence purchased and are paying a lot more that we should given the usage has gone down a lot. Which makes me to think about migrating reports to PowerBI. I know its not gonna be easy task but given Azure envoirnment and report usage we are thinking if we should take up a task to utilize PowerBI mainly for static reporting.

I know we will be losing the associate engine but thats where this question needs a helpful answer from the community who might have migrated to PowerBI or used both tools and what their experience is. Paying for more than 75 users when we only have about 10-15 actual users over long term doesnt seem right. But another quesiton is, is it worth the time commiment, shifting to PowerBI to save on future costs and learning the new tool completely in terms of end user and developer? 

[Greg_Deckler]

@TheDataviz This is a great question but is going to be somewhat situational. First, I am of the opinion with what I know that honestly this is a no brainer in terms of "yes, the value is tremendous if you switch" in just about any situation but that will be for later. 

So let's get the obvious stuff out of the way:

• First, with an E5 license you already own Power BI Pro obviously. So you are paying for essentially the same thing twice. 
• Power Query can handle any ETL that's necessary
• Can the feature functionality be matched 1:1 essentially? Absolutely

So some analysis. With 10-15 people using Qlik reports today (out of 75?) building a data culture at that company has been a pretty sad failure. Is a data culture important and valuable to your business and if so, if the current tool isn't getting the job done, maybe there are reasons for it and it would be important to switch. This is a big factor in the true value component in my opinion and could go either way. Maybe it isn't the tool, maybe it's how it was implemented or how it was rolled out and people were trained. Do you want self-service analytics or are you sticking with the "everything goes through IT because they business people are idiots" mentality. Which, they think the same thing about the IT guys because IT guys are idiots about the business.

How many reports are we talking? How many are actually used that you will need to migrate? This factors into the cost component. If you only need to migrate a handful of reports that are actually used, why wouldn't you? Learning curves aren't tremendous. I know plenty of people that know Tableau and Power BI or Qlik and Power BI and a few that know them all as well as SSRS.

Where is the market? How easy is it to find resources for one or the other? How expensive are they, this is going to vary by region and specific location. Which one is growing in market share and which one is shrinking? This again speaks towards availability of talent. 

I think if you answer those questions and likely quite a few more, then you will have your answer in today's world.

[TheDataviz]

@Greg_Deckler 

Thank you for the detailed reply. Let me reply to some of your comments and provide more details.

With 10-15 people using Qlik reports today (out of 75?) - So basically with people much less than 75. Its the number of licences we have. We have more than 75 licences as part of initial agreement. 10-15 people are actually people who use reporting. Out of that 5-7 are power users and others are regualr viewers. 

There are various reasons. These are basically just initial thoughts and I understand this will involve significant energy in terms of migration. We are thiking about meeting with users, we already have report usage analytics. The reports are 4-5 years old and many of them are not being updated. Most of them serve the purpose of static reports.

So the reasons being , revisiting the reporting envoirnemnt through this practice and see what we can get rid of or what new reports we can build for user. We have OEM licence during initial Qlik agreement so we are stuck paying a lot of money for the liencences which we dont use , and probably, will, never be used. We are Micorsoft shop and almost finished with moving to Azure and just got E5 licence. 

As per your last paragraph, I have definitly seen more availibilty in terms of PowerBI developers based on the activity and as I follow the tool a little I know they have been adding a lot of features. I also understand that most BI tools have similar functionality and it all works case by case basis.  My aim basically is to bug people who have gone through this process or worked in PBI and get thier feedback as you have given here very well.