Microsoft Power BI: Service Overview and Insight

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Bottom Line:

There are few (if any) Big Data platforms that are as well reviewed and well regarded as Microsoft’s BI. In recent years, Microsoft has extended Power BI to enable organizations to integrate Big Data use cases, and so far the response has been positive.

For those organizations that had already been using Power BI for data analytics, extending the use case for Big Data is a no brainer. It’s also an easy choice for those that have already standardized on a Microsoft stack, including Microsoft’s Big Data technologies and the Azure cloud. Simply put, if you’re used to using Microsoft Excel, then moving to Power BI won’t seem all that new.

A key differentiator for the platform is integration with the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, which supports HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) for advanced big data analytics.

Service Description:

Power BI is fully featured Business Intelligence platform that provides an easy on-ramp into Big Data Analytics.

Power BI provides cloud-based business analytics and integrates what Microsoft calls “content packs” with pre-built dashboards and reports for different types of analysis and data monitoring. The collaboration capabilities in the platform enables users to share data and dashboards, while also providing alerting capabilities.

Features:

• Real-time data monitoring. Providing the ability for user to actively monitor data.

• Natural language data query. Users can use everyday natural language to ask the questions they want, to get the insights they need.

• Pre-Built dashboards. The Power BI content packs provide pre-built dashboards for integrating and understanding data from different data providers.

• Collaboration. Data can be shared across authorized users and to mobile devices.

Delivery:

Software-as-a-Service.

Use Cases:

Organizations already invested in the Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage system for Big Data.

Pricing:

Pro plan costs $9.99 per user per month.
Premium plan is built on a capacity pricing, charging per node per month.

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