What is Power BI?
We took forward the vision of creating a “ready to go” solution that users and IT can get up and running in minutes. Built on top of Office 365, Power BI provides an integrated analytical platform in the cloud that connects to your important information from where it lives via the Excel interface users know.
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.
Available in preview today, Power BI’s new business analytics experience makes it easy for customers to:
- 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.