Power BI news

You probably have heard the news already but we have some exciting information that has been released on the new Power BI service as you, for all the details read the blog post on Microsoft.

Some great new functionality that is being released are:

• – Dashboards that allow you to gain insights in your data right away. A single pane of glass for all your data. You can mix and match data from several data sources onto a single dashboard.
• – Many new datavisualizations like treemap, fill map and many more.
• – An amazing Ipad  app to connect to your data
• – Out of the box connectivity to many data sources like SalesForce and GitHub.
• – Hyrbrid connectivity, meaning connect to your on prem tabular models and visualize using the latest and greatest data visualizations in the cloud.
• – Developer API’s that allow you to create datasets and push data into Power BI. (see http://dev.powerbi.com for more details)
• – Last but not least is the new Power BI designer that will merge Power Pivot, Power View and Power Query into a single experience that will focus on making analytics visual and easy to do.

Of course this is a preview release so there is much more to come soon for all this functionality.

And of course the last very important item is the price:

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.

I have a few blog post I am working on to cover some new functionality for the designer and the developer API’s that I’ll finish soon!.

Now go to http://www.powerbi.com/dashboards to go and sign up yourself.

Update: I got some questions about what happens with existing Office 365, the straight answer is that existing Power BI for Office 365 customers will be able to transition to the Power BI Pro experience when it is made available using their existing subscription license. Additional details will be made available as we approach general availability. For more details see this blog post: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/licensing.aspx