From today’s announcement, it seems as if things are coming together and Microsoft are indeed winning. This news includes a mobile business intelligence deliverable. As you know, business users love Excel and it made sense for Microsoft to put Excel at the heart of their business intelligence strategy. For those who skim read, the main point is that the Microsoft Business intelligence strategy is coming together, and now that Microsoft are delivering a user-oriented Business Intelligence solution with mobile functionality (yes, even iPad!) that hopefully a lot of the heat will have gone away and Microsoft have resolved the Scylla and Charybdis problem by producing something very special and useful for business users.
So what has been delivered? Today at the World Partner Conference, exciting news was released about this very topic, with the news that Power BI for Office 365 has been released.
Power BI for Office 365 is a self-service business intelligence solution surfaced to users through Excel and Office 365. Essentially, business users can get Excel-happy with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights. The data can be held on-premise or within a trusted cloud environment. Excel, in other words, becomes the front end for allowing business users to have fun with their data.
What does Power BI for Office 365 mean for ordinary users? With Power BI for Office 365, customers can connect to data in the cloud or extend their existing on premise data sources and systems to quickly build and deploy self-service BI solutions hosted in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud.
Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to do more with their data:
- Analyze and present insights from data in compelling visual formats either on premises or in the cloud from Excel.
- Share reports and data sets online with data that is always kept up to date.
- Ask questions of your data using natural language search and get immediate answers through interactive tables, charts and graphs.
- Access and stay connected to data and reports from your mobile devices wherever you are.
I’m very happy about this announcement because it’s what customers have been waiting for. My customers have been asking for this for years, and now it is almost here, customers will see things fall into place. Excel is the way forward for Microsoft Business Intelligence: hence, PowerView, Data Explorer (now Power Query) and Geoflow (now Power Map) are now part of the Office 365 story. And what a story!
The truth is that the majority of BI work is done in Excel, and I think Microsoft are just bringing everything home to where the Business Users do most of their work. It’s about working with the Excel users, and giving people opportunities to work with other data that are outside of their internal business walls.
You can sign up for can visit http://www.office.com/powerbi on Monday, July 8 to sign up to be notified when the preview of Power BI for Office 365 is available later this summer. I’m heading over to do it now, and finally I can give my customers the answers they’ve been looking for.
Goodbye Scylla and Charybdis 🙂
