Microsoft's Power BI gets a major boost; to hit shelves on July 24th

Microsoft is adding new capabilities to its cloud-based suite of data analysis tools, Power BI.  In a blog post , the company announced that “the Power BI analytics service (Power BI 2.0) will exit preview status, becoming a generally available service on July 24. This supersedes the Power BI for Office 365 service (Power BI 1.0), which we will continue to operate during a transition period as users migrate to the updated service.”

Power BI Desktop (known before today as Power BI Designer) will also exit preview and become generally available on July 24.

Users who subscribe to specific services can connect to their accounts through Power BI to access prebuilt reports and dashboards. Microsoft has released content packs for 16 services, including Salesforce, Marketo, etc.

Power BI offers new capabilities including, real-time dashboards and support for streaming data. With Power BI users can monitor streaming data sources via live, continuously updating visuals. Maintain an up-to-the-moment pulse on your business.

Power BI doesn’t require an organisation to move or copy data to the cloud to benefit from Power BI. “Whether your data is on-premises or in the cloud, stored in a relational database or Hadoop, or resident in a business application that’s custom, packaged or SaaS, Power BI can send queries to the data versus pulling data to itself. You can do that too – and Power BI provides world-class extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities. In some cases this may be preferred (as when the source database query performance is too slow for interactive data analysis).”

It also features natural language interface. Power BI permits users to ask questions of their data. As users type their questions, visualisations appear and are successively refined as they continue to type. “No need to learn complex query languages or master some gesture-based exploration tool.”

Across the Microsoft data platform there is bi-directional awareness of and integration with Power BI. For example, when a user creates a new Azure Data Warehouse, or a new Azure Stream Analytics solution, there is a one-click option to make that data available in Power BI. Conversely, if user have an existing HDInsight dataset fronted by Spark, or a tabular data model in SQL Server Analysis Services, there is a one-click option in Power BI to connect back to those sources of data.

In addition, there are native Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android apps that keep mobile users connected with their data.

The company also contributed the Power BI visualization framework and its complete library of visuals to the open source community under an MIT license – source code and more is available today on GitHub.

Over half a million unique users, across more than 45,000 companies spanning 185 countries have signed up for Power BI in the six months it’s been in preview, the company added.

Currently known as the Power BI Designer, the Power BI Desktop is a new data-reporting tool freely available on PowerBI.com.