BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through easy-to-use dashboards, provides interactive reports, and delivers compelling visualizations that bring data to life.

Power BI differentiates from the competitors in 5 unique areas:

1. Industry leadership
2. Self-service live connections to a variety of data sources on prem or in the cloud,
3. Live 360 degree view of your business on the web as well as on your phone or tablet running a native app
4. Unparalleled user experience, from the ability to use custom visuals (i.e., user community contributed visuals built on top of an open source visualization stack from Microsoft) to taking advantage of your personal digital assistant Cortana to ask questions of your data in natural language
5. Native integration with apps + services that you rely on for your business, e.g., integration with Office & Azure to create a platform for business intelligence, embedding in other apps + service, i.e., bring your own visuals inside your favorite apps + services

Industry Leadership

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, February 2016

• Leader in MQ for 9^th consecutive year
• Placed furthest in vision

Also leader in Agile BI by Forrester, September 2015 and PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award December 2015

Bring your data together in new ways, where it is, yourself (self service)

• Multiple direct connectors to the most popular data sources, e.g., Excel, SQL, Azure, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, QuickBooks, etc. Chances are whatever your data source, there’s highly likely a way for you to connect to it yourself
• Multiple content packs that provide Pre-built solutions include dashboards, reports, and data models available out-of-the-box for SaaS services or built by your organization. Gets you going quickly to the things that matter: dashboards, reports, etc., rather than getting caught up in figuring out the data connection, data prep, etc.
• New connectors and content packs are being added every week

Live 360 view of your business

• See your data update in real time on the web or on your devices
• Stay connected to your data, i.e., your business, with native apps on your phone or tablet
• Native apps on iOS, Android, and Windows – so you can use your favorite device

Unmatched UX

• Rich library of built in visuals – more being added frequently – so that you can create the dashboard/report just the way you want it
• Custom visuals created by user community built on top of open source visualization stack from Microsoft – the possibilities are endless here in terms of creativity and innovation
• Ask questions of your data using natural language, leveraging Cortana capability – going beyond the traditional keyboard & mouse and even touch human machine interaction

Integration with apps + services that matter to you

• Integrated with Office & Azure to create a platform for business intelligence. It’s not just about a point solution; it’s a complete end to end platform for business intelligence
• Embed your own visuals inside your favorite apps + services to maintain consistency of that dashboard/report view that everyone in your organization is familiar with and loves – all the while the data behind the scene gets updated and the embedded view inside your favorite apps]+ services automatically gets updated too.

CONNECTS TO SEVERAL SOLUTIONS

Power BI dashboards

With updates to Power BI customers can now see all their data through a single pane of glass. Live Power BI dashboards show visualizations and KPIs from data that reside both on-premises and in the cloud, providing a consolidated view across their business regardless of where their data lives.

Simplifying how you interact with data, natural language query is built into the dashboard allowing users to type questions and receive answers from data in the form of interactive visualizations.

You can then explore their data further by drilling through the dashboard into the underlying reports, discovering new insights that they can pin back to the dashboard to monitor performance going forward.

Stay connected from any device

We are working on the next wave of mobile apps for Power BI. These apps will allow users to access their Power BI dashboards through immersive mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Windows, and Android devices – releasing throughout H1 CY2015. On Dec 18^th the iPad app will be the first available and found in the Apple store, with the other apps following in the coming months. These apps will also allow users to receive alerts to important changes in their data as well as to share and collaborate with colleagues so that they can take immediate action, from any device.