The new BI service offers greater licensing flexibility, improved scale and performance
A new premium version of Microsoft’s business analytics tool, Power BI Premium, is now generally available following a month-long beta period.
The aim of the new service is to provide businesses with a more flexible distribution and pricing model, giving them more options for how users access, share and distribute content. This includes the ability to distribute data visualisations to recipients who aren’t individually licensed to use the software, and customise performance based on the needs of a team, department or the organisation itself.
James Phillips, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence organisation, launched the service at the two-day Microsoft Data Insights Summit, which kicked off yesterday. He said that the goal is to make Power BI more accessible to everyone.
“It's, by far, the most widely-used service that we use inside the company other than Office 365 email,” Phillips said. “Everyone is using Power BI to run their businesses.”
Power BI Premium is available in a range of capacity sizes, each with different numbers of virtual cores and memory sizes that can scale as requirements change. It also comes with some new features, including a Report Server that can run on premise and the ability for developers to integrate the service into apps by using Power BI Embedded.
Looking ahead, Microsoft plans to add more powerful reports that feature custom drill-through pages, navigation buttons, what-if parameters and bookmarks.