There are now scores of blogs and web articles available that do a great job of introducing Power BI (a good example can be found here) so there is little value in re-hashing it in this post. I do, however, want to reflect and pontificate a bit on this announcement.
- The most important piece of news for me is Mobile BI. Mobile BI has been a sore topic in the Microsoft BI world for a while now and I think this is the first time we have heard anything semi-official from Microsoft confirming that PowerView will be delivered using HTML5. I am not sure how I feel about the “Cloud First and Cloud Only” strategy yet. Hopefully, Microsoft will release a public roadmap for Mobile BI functionality soon. If nothing else, we now have some evidence that this functionality is coming (albeit in Office365 flavor first) which, if nothing else, gives me a little more strength to wait a little longer
- The Power Query and Power Map are great additions to the MS BI features, with Power Query product being dramatically more significant one of the two. Both of these products have now been around for a while, although under different names. Given the fact that both are delivered as Excel add-ons (which means they run on a desktop), I am a little confused with the fact that they are being marketed with the Power BI which is a cloud Office365 offering
- Natural Language Query Language – this will be a great Demo feature, however, I am a little skeptical with how practical it will be
- Data Stewardship – sounds like a neat feature but I think we need some clarity with respect to where this fits in on the MDS roadmap for SQL Server
- I am also encouraged by the news that the PowerPivot workbooks deployed in Power BI environment will be able to refresh from the on premise data sources. I can only then assume that Azure IaaS connectivity will also be supported.
There is something in this announcement that I find a little bit confusing. I would normally expect new functionality to be added to the enterprise feature set first and to the Self Service use case later. I am afraid that a lot of IT shops will find it a little discouraging that BI features they provide via the enterprise toolset are inferior to what the end users will get for a self-service use case in the cloud.
business intelligist 
Hi,
“would normally expect new functionality to be added to the enterprise feature set first and to the Self Service use case later.”
That remark suggests that you’re of the opinion that the two are mutually exclusive, am I correct? Why do you think that? Why shouldn’t self-service BI be available in an enterprise?
regards
Jamie
It absolutely should be. I just think that the order in which the functionality is released to be strange… The situation would be different, had we had a well defined road map of when and how the features will be released. Without the road map, one might think that Microsoft is trying to have two separate plans / products / license scenarios for enterprise and self service tracks and I think this can be a very bad massage to send to the market
I’ve confirmations that HTML5 support for PowerView, and also for mobile dashboards, will be released in the SQL2014 edition for the on-premise SW. What I think is that cloud is like a good place to try all this stuff, they can do incremental add-ons and corrections, and tune the product with the feedback of the O365 users. Then, when ready, they put in the non so flexible enviroment that is EE SW. That’s, of course, my point of view, but several additions are now appearing first in the cloud (some Yammer funcionality, for example), and MS people has confirmed me that this is a better place to “tune” some things.
I’ve confirmation from MS dev teams that cloud first will be the strategy for new (web related) technology agile development, but also that all stuff first and gradually delivered in the cloud will be ported to enterprise products.