I guess in the age of rapid development and releases the fact of General Availability of the Power BI v 2.0 on the last friday, 24th of July 2015 was something that anyone somehow connected to the world of Business Intelligence could have missed.
Even though so many Microsoft Data Platform fans, myself included, were hyping about it – nobody else can compare with Jen Underwood, Microsoft BI Program Manager who were simply stirring huge waves on the social media.
I guess that as a matter of a fact during this launch phase, she did not sleep more than a couple of hours per day, being overly present on the social media and all possible live workshops that were launched upon the world community.
Power BI arrives with a massive support of Power BI Desktop (aka Power BI Designer), Web authoring and data exploration, Power BI Content Packs (ranging from Google Analytics to Sage and SQLSentry, MailChimp, Exchange, ActiveDirectory and so on), Direct connectivity to Apache Spark (you will see me dedicating to the topic of Spark in the nearest future), and much more.
A particularly interesting kind of enhancements in my opinion is the inclusion of the “Power BI visuals open source project“, which is basically a D3.JS project, coming is an open source project on GitHub, which should allow in the future the complete process of creation and inclusion of your own visualisation on PowerBI.com.
At the moment it does not work, but the promise sounds very interesting & exciting.
Do not take me wrong, I see a lot of caveaets in the journey for making PowerBI a truly democratised & accessible solution, accessible for any & every type of for-profit and non-profit companies.
I will refer here to a good friend of mine who is working with a number of small & medium companies in Portugal. When Microsoft announced the Power BI v2, he simply said – “Finally comes something that I can really offer to my clients as a definitive solution for their businesses. If Microsoft will keep the price at this point, I think there will be a huge number of companies signing up in the months and years to come”.
I tend to agree with him, if Microsoft will keep the momentum and start pushing out a clear roadmap for this product, we might be talking about a new leader in the BI market.
I would like to believe that in a couple of years, looking back at this day we shall feel that it was a historic moment for the Microsoft BI Platform and for the Business Intelligence in general.
I will not focus on all the enhancements and the amazing functionalities of Power BI, there are so many inspiring posts on this topic already.
I simply invite you to try it out. :)