Microsoft announces
Power BI Premium, a capacity-based licensing model that can provide customers and organizations the ability to get access to critical intelligence, along with the flexibility of sharing and distributing the content in Power BI.
Power BI Premium empowers the users with high performance and additional scalability via the following features.
- Flexibility to license by capacity – Organizations can opt for different levels of access for their different users based on their unique needs. “Power BI Premium enables Power BI Pro users to publish reports broadly across the enterprise and beyond, without requiring recipients to be licensed per user.”
- Scalability and performance – Capacity customization is made easy. Now, organizations can either allocate customized capacity to each workspace depending on the user strength, workload, or other factors, or apply the dedicated capacity broadly. Also, scaling that up and down as per requirement is now possible. Microsoft has provided a calculator also for capacity planning.
Image Source: powerbi.microsoft.com
- Power BI apps simplified – Organizations can now deploy dashboards and reports to specific people, groups or an entire organization. Apps installation and navigation is simplified for business users. So is centralizing content in one place and updating the apps.
- Power BI Embedded converged with Power BI Service – Now, the Power BI Embedded and Power BI Service are mixed together so as to deliver one API surface and eliminate the complexity. Users get a consistent set of capabilities and access to the latest features altogether with the ability to move to deployment on Power BI Premium.
- On-premises capabilities – Users are now capable of maintaining BI assets on on-premises also. For this, Microsoft has announced Power BI Report Server.
As per Microsoft,
“Power BI Report Server is an on-premises server that enables Power BI Pro users to publish Power BI reports and distribute them broadly across the enterprise, without requiring report consumers to be licensed individually per user. Organizations now have the flexibility to publish their Power BI reports to the cloud (Power BI service), or manage them on-premises (Power BI Report Server) and move to the cloud at their pace.”
However, the Power BI Report Server will be ready by the end of the second quarter of 2017, which means late in June. Also, Microsoft is planning to simplify the free Power BI Services so as to eliminate the confusion among users regarding Power BI Pro and the free service.
“Going forward, we will improve the free service to have the same functionality as Power BI Pro, but will limit sharing and collaboration features to only Power BI Pro users. Users of the free Power BI service will benefit from access to all data sources, increased workspace storage limits, and higher refresh and streaming rates. These changes will be effective June 1."
Power BI Premium will be generally available from late June. However, you can access the initial
SKU and pricing information so that you can plan your business model accordingly.