Microsoft has unveiled a series of enhancements to its Power BI data-visualization and exploration tool, including an integration with Cortana for voice-based queries; a set of algorithms for quickly surfacing insights from data sets; and an enterprise-level gateway for connecting to on-premise data sources.
Here are the key details on the announcements from Microsoft's official Power BI blog.
One of the key ways Power BI enables more people to connect with and gain insight from their data is our natural language data search feature, Q&A. Now these Q&A capabilities are helping Cortana to intelligently reason over the data you have access to in Power BI and provide rich data-driven answers to your questions. Combined with the Cortana Analytics Suite, this opens up amazing new opportunities to use Cortana to enable your business, and your customers' businesses, to get things done in more helpful, proactive, and natural ways.
By utilizing Power BI’s data visualization capabilities, answers can range from simple numerical values (“revenue for the last quarter”), charts (“number of opportunities by team”), maps (“average customer spending in California by city”), or even complete reports from Power BI all provided directly from Cortana. Potential answers are either determined by Cortana on the fly directly from the data, or by using reports already created in Power BI that help answer a question. To further explore an answer, users can simply open a result in Power BI.
Power BI’s new Quick Insights feature allows you to run a variety of analytical algorithms on your data to search for potential insights with the click of a mouse. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, we’re honing a growing list of algorithms to discover and visualize correlations, outliers, trends, seasonality, change points in trends, and major factors within your data, automatically, within seconds.
To scan your data for potential insights all you have to do is select “Quick Insights” for a dataset uploaded to Power BI. For 10-12 seconds Power BI will iterate across your data searching for subsets of data you may find interesting. If we find something that meets the criteria of one of our insight categories we visualize it, along with any other insights we’ve found, for you to browse.
Analysis: Microsoft Both Leads and Follows with New Capabilities
The Cortana integration "is very cool, particularly for interaction through mobile devices, where it's hard to type," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Microsoft has a first here, but don't expect it to be alone. IBM also supports natural-language Q&A with its cloud-based Watson Analytics offering, and adding in Watson voice-recognition capabilities would not be difficult. The same goes for Amazon, which has natural-language and voice-processing capabilities in its portfolio."
As for Quick Insights, Microsoft is "late to the party on this front," Henchsen says. "IBM Watson Analytics already does the same trick of surfacing the most relevant insights in a data set or combination of data sets that you upload. Ditto Amazon Web Services, which makes this promise with QuickSight."
[Note: Go here for Doug's report on IBM Watson Analytics (subscription required for full version) and here for his recent coverage of QuickSight.]
"IBM's Watson Analytics capabilities are generally available today, whereas Amazon QuickSight and Microsoft Quick Insights are both in preview," Henschen says. "Once all three are generally available, I'd be keen to do a qualitative comparison uploading the same data set in all three to see what they come up with independently."
"Microsoft is said to be working on exposing the Cortana connection to Power BI through mobile devices," Henschen adds. "No doubt the hard part there is non-Microsoft mobile devices (like iOS) that have Cortana-like services of their own, (like Siri)."
Taking Power BI Upmarket
Microsoft received less attention for another Power BI-related announcement this week, involving the preview availability of Power BI Gateway for enterprise deployments.
A personal gateway, which allows indivdual users to refresh their data from on-premise sources without the need for help from IT, was already available. Microsoft also offered a data management gateway for the version of Power BI for Office 365 being deprecated on Dec. 31.
The new enterprise gateway will succeed that product and provides centralized management of user credentials, access and data sources. The initial version supports live connections to SQL Server databases through DirectQuery, according to Microsoft's blog post on the announcement:
This means that you can view the latest data from Power BI without the need to schedule a refresh. With live connections, there is no limit on the size of the model as data is not stored in the model. Live connectivity to SQL Server Analysis Services models (tabular and multi-dimensional) is planned to be supported with the enterprise gateway, within the next few weeks.
As others have already noted, the lack of an enterprise-grade gateway for Power BI was a shortcoming for for hybrid BI scenarios. Microsoft is planning to roll out additional new features, including support for scheduled refreshes and connections to data sources besides SQL Server.
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