Power BI just keeps getting better

Some great news coming out of the Microsoft Ignite conference this week. Microsoft are addressing some issues with their offering which is going to make Power BI much more competitive.

Opening caveat - I'm not paid by Microsoft (but if they want to throw some $'s my way, my doors always open). I find that their tools are sometimes not as slick as some competitors, and the user experience with their products is occasionally frustrating, but I absolutely respect the enormous capability they are able to bring to the masses. And they just keep bringing it...

1. Power BI Premium per user

First off, what the hell is Power BI premium.

Premium lets you have data consumers in your organisation that are not preparers but can still access the full functionality of dashboards. You buy wholesale capacity from Microsoft, and all members of your organisation can then use that capacity.

In a prior role, we had Power BI dashboards for building supervisors, and we had a large number of suppliers that we worked closely with, and tracked their performance using Power BI. With premium, we did not need to licence these supervisors (who were never going to be crunching their own data with a pro licence). We could also have guest users, so for the two days a month where we come together with partner organisations to assess performance, they could securely be given access to our dashboards that we controlled that showed their performance.

At the moment, to get the benefits of a Power BI Premium licence, you would need to commit to around $80k p.a.. So if you're a data driven organisation with a headcount around 100 to 200 people, your main option was to buy a bucket load of Power BI pro licences to consume content, which is just not practical. It's also wasteful, as a pro licence is for producers of content, not consumers. At a really high level, the break even point where it is more economical to switch to the lowest premium space is about 500 users (less if you cost in the extra admin cost of keeping track of several hundred licences). When you compare it to the per user Tableau server pricing, Tableau had become much more compelling for smaller organisations.

Enter Premium per user. Soon you will be able to procure Premium on a linear scale, so as you grow, your data visualisation suite can grow with it. Pricing and the details are still to come, but will be a great move to making Power BI more price competitive.

2. Better Teams integration

I was always confused about why you can only consume a very limited amount of Power BI content in Microsoft Teams. You can share a Power BI report per tab currently in Teams, but not explore all of the content that you might have on your instance. Its not realistic to think that teams only look at one report. Small to medium organisations are not confined to just sales in Australia - you have one team that are responsible for safety, quality, operations, commercial outcomes. With multiple responsibilities comes multiple reports.

Soon that portal will be expanded so that you can browse content. Sanity prevails.

3. Visual data preparation

I am a big fan of visual data flows. Tools like Alteryx and KNIME have a much more intuitive look and feel for me than Power Query, which is all tabular based. The only way that you can see what you've done along the way is a list of step names, that by default don't help anyone, such as "Add Conditional Column1", so need to be renamed constantly.

When you are building a data pipeline, you have queries that branch out and get rejoined, as you reshape the data to be at the right granularity for the different views in your report. With a visual data flow, you can see the lineage and the changes that occur as you go.

Where as Premium per user it aimed at catching up with Tableau, I think this is aimed at catching up with Alteryx. Full disclosure - I love Alteryx. Love. But, I am super excited at the prospect of Power Query becoming a workflow tool that lets you drag and drop tools into your data pipeline. My hope is that intuitive, inbuilt machine learning toolsets get added to the ribbon, so that if I wanted to, I can drop a Naive Bayes tool straight into my Power Query pipeline from Power BI.

4. Power Automate Desktop

It's not Power BI, but its still Power platform and still really interesting.

A desktop version of power automate is coming, aimed at cornering the RPA market. You'll hopefully be able to deploy Azure bots using a nice familiar Microsoft like interface, to automate the manual processes that weigh you down. Where as Power Query / Power BI dataflows can automate the manual manipulation of data, Power Automate hopefully will help automate those tasks that you need to do between applications (e.g. read this screen from SAP, compare it to this web page, decide if its over a threshold and then send an accept / reject email).

• Premium per user - Microsoft makes up ground on Tableau
• Visual data prep - Microsoft makes up ground on Alteryx
• Power Automate Desktop - Microsoft will make up ground on UIPath

It's amazing how many fronts Microsoft can compete on. They might not be first to market with the ideas, but they are relentless in their pursuit of bringing those great ideas to the masses. I'm excited to see how the Power platform evolves over the next 12 months.