Power BI: Another Player in the Game

First up, Power BI for Office 365

Power BI for Office 365

An year ago till a couple of months ago, when we spoke of Power BI, it meant just one thing: Power BI for Office 365. Power BI for Office 365 is portrayed as a self-service business intelligence (or data analytics) tool on the cloud. The product is basically;

• Excel 2013 with a bunch of add-ons for report authoring,
• and special sites called Power BI sites on Office 365 for sharing and collaboration of the reports created using Excel, plus a few more goodies

Going further, Excel 2013 is the essential component of Power BI for Office 365. It is where all the data extraction, clean-up, consolidation and modeling happens (Power Query and Power Pivot). It is also where the reports and analytics is done (Power View and Power Map). The best thing about this is that all these add-on that I have mentioned are free, and can be used even without purchasing Power BI for Office 365 (PowerMap requires that you have an Office 365 ProPlus subscription). Then, if you need to share it with others, you to put the workbook on a Power BI site. This enables others in your team to see the data and collaborate on it as well. Apart from this, Power BI for Office 365 allows

• analysis using natural language questions (in English) with Q&A,
• creating and managing a repository of queries and data sources (including on-premise), on the cloud,
• and access data from the Power BI Windows Store App so that information is available on the go on Windows tables

The pricing for Power BI for Office 365 currently looks like this, and has more than what I have described here. For more information I recommend reading this, the Power BI for Office 365 service description and FAQs.

And now, there is a new player in the game. And it’s from Microsoft itself…

Self-Service Business Intelligence Presentations

For those who are interested, here are the two presentations that I presented at Dev Day 2014 and SLASSCOM TechTalks: Smart Data Engineering on the 17th and 26th of November, respectively.

Serve Yourself: Self-Service Business Intelligence

(Dev Day 2014)

Self-Service Business Intelligence

(SLASSCOM TechTalks: Smart Data Engineering. Lightning Talk)

Slaughter Analytics – Part 1

So I got this wonderful opportunity to present at Dev Day 2014, here in Colombo, a couple weeks ago, and since my craze with Power BI was still at an all time high, I submitted to talk about self-service business intelligence. Despite the concept being around in the mainstream for at least a couple of years, it was decided that it was a fantastic topic to be presented on, and I was given the go ahead. A week later, I got another opportunity to present the same, albeit in a constricted version, as part of a series of lightning talks at the first ever SLASSCOM TechTalks session, titled “Smart Data Engineering”.

This post is a follow-up to these presentations, where I try to explain my demo that I performed on stage.