Microsoft today announced that the new Power BI will be generally available on July 24. Power BI is a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics service.
The extensive list of new features and capabilities delivered over the six month preview period provides some indication of the scale of our investment in Power BI. It is evidence of our commitment to relentless execution to delivering value to our users with unmatched speed and agility.
Though our innovation pace has been high, it is more than sustainable and it is reasonable to expect acceleration. A meaningful percentage of our energy over the last year has been directed toward laying a solid foundation for a global-scale service that can support over a billion users – our aspiration. Laying that foundation was an exit criterion for declaring Power BI generally available. With the foundation in place, more energy will now flow to user-visible product and service enhancements.
Microsoft is making following 4 big announcements related to PowerBI,
- The Power BI business 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. We’ve renamed the product to better reflect the power and intent of this world-class business analytics tool.
- Today we 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.
- T. K. “Ranga” Rengarajan announced a new data service today, Apache Spark for HDInsight, our Hadoop service on Azure. Spark leverages main memory in contrast to the two-stage, disk-based MapReduce paradigm often used with data stored in Hadoop. Query performance over a Hadoop dataset can be 100 times faster with Spark. Last night we updated the Power BI service adding direct support for this new service enabling users to monitor, explore and visualize their HDInsight data in Power BI.
Read more about it here.