This week, Microsoft made two announcements regarding its Power BI product offering as well as an update regarding its Cortana Intelligence Suite.
Power BI Embedded, originally announced at Build earlier this year, will allow the inclusion of Power BI analytics inside of independently developed applications. One of the benefits of this new Azure service is that there is no requirement for the end user to be licensed for Power BI. However, starting in September, Microsoft plans to have a "new, simplified billing by charging by report loads rather than individual visuals." The service will be released to the public next week on July 11.
Secondly, Microsoft announced Power BI "publish to web", which allows users to publish or embed their interactive Power BI visualizations on public websites. Users can also choose to share their "publish to web" creations in the newly available Data Stories Gallery and interact with other Power BI users in a forum setting. This functionality is now publicly available at no extra cost to Free and Pro users of Power BI.
Finally, the company released "Cortana Intelligence with Bing Predicts" into preview this week. Bing Predicts is a service that uses a variety of search and social data to predict the outcome of events as evidenced with the FIFA Women"s World Cup and the NBA draft last year with admirable accuracy. The combination of "Cortana Intelligence" and "Bing Predicts" will allow users to enrich their data with consumer search, social and web data to help generate actionable insights into areas such as industry trends and customer demographics.
These announcements come ahead of Microsoft"s first Data Science Summit, which it will host from September 26 to 28, 2016 in Atlanta, alongside its Microsoft Ignite conference.
Source: Microsoft