Meet the new Power BI

Tim Tetrick

On January 27 Microsoft unveiled its new Power BI service, which is available now as a free Preview. We also announced a brand new pricing structure.  At general availability, we will introduce a free offer, available as Power BI.  We’ll also introduce Power BI Pro, with additional data capacity and features for the enterprise.  This offering will be available at $9.99 per user per month, which represents a 75 percent reduction in price from the current offering.  For more information on the new pricing and features, see Power BI Pricing.

The preview adds a number of new Power BI capabilities, including dashboards, new visualizations, support for popular software-as-a-service applications, a native iPad app and live “hybrid” connectivity to on-premises SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models.

For those of you not familiar with Power BI yet, 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.

For more information on the announcement, and to see a video demonstration of Power BI in action, go here.

For additional info, and a more thorough demonstration of the new Power BI, see First look at the new Power BI Preview.