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Microsoft mainstreams business intelligence with new and improved Power BI Preview

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Today is an incredibly exciting day as we unveil the new Power BI – a service we believe will fundamentally transform the “business of business intelligence.” Power BI can help every company adopt a data culture with easy-to-use, accessible tools and innovative technology that lowers the barrier to entry, for all.
For those not familiar with Power BI, it is a cloud-based business analytics service (software-as-a -service) for non-technical business users. With just a browser – any browser – or a Power BI mobile app, customers can keep a pulse on their business via live operational dashboards. They can deeply explore their business data, through interactive visual reports, and enrich it with additional data sources. We launched the first version of Power BI last February and since then customers have used it to gain powerful insights, helping them become more productive and competitive.
Meet the new Power BI
Available in preview today, Power BI’s new business analytics experience makes it easy for customers to:
    • Sign up – All you need is a business email address and you’re in.
    • Connect – Connect to your data in minutes, with built-in connectors and pre-built dashboards and reports from a wide variety of sources including GitHub, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SendGrid and Zendesk. More are coming in the next few months including Inkling Markets, Intuit, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Sage, Sumo Logic, Visual Studio Application Insights, Visual Studio Online, and many more. And Power BI is “hybrid” by design, so customers can leverage their on premise data investments while getting all the benefits of our cloud-based analytics service.
    • Use – With a new tool – Power BI Designer – that allows business analysts to connect to, model and visually analyze their data. They can then effortlessly publish the results to any Power BI customer. We also released a preview ofPower BI for iPad – now available for download from the Apple App Store. Later this year we’ll also introduce iPhone, Android and Windows universal apps.
Today, anyone with a US business email account can try the preview of the new Power BI for free. We’ll expand to international users in the future. When we reach general availability we will introduce a free offer, available as Power BI. We’ll also introduce Power BI Pro, available at a low monthly price, with additional data capacity and features for the enterprise. In anticipation of this move, on February 1 we are lowering the price of our in-market Power BI service to $9.99 per user a month, a 75 percent reduction in price. More information on these offers is available here.

Maximizing your data dividend
With Power BI customers can wring every drop of value from each byte of their data. Whether it’s in a datacenter, private cloud, our public cloud — or a combination of all three — customers who store their data in the Microsoft platform stand to realize a greater data dividend than with any other vendor.
Data drives business and we are all dealing with more data than ever before. So, I encourage you to preview the new Power BI today by signing up for a free account. To find out more about Microsoft’s data platform and how we can help create new solutions that bring together big data insights, predictive analytics and powerful visualizations, go here.
Author - James Phillips - General Manager, Data Experiences - Microsoft

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