Microsoft Adds Heavyweight BI to Office 365

Microsoft has addressed the rather patchy business intelligence functionality in Office 365 this week with the announcement that it is launching Power BI for Office 365 later this summer. Power BI will be a cloud-based suite built on a number of existing Microsoft intelligence apps with an Excel-based authoring environment.

Power BI

However, business intelligence (BI) is only as good as the people that can access and use it, so the new suite from Microsoft also comes with new collaboration abilities that enable users to push data analysis and visualizations to wherever it is needed in the enterprise.

The new suite fills a gap that has been apparent in Office 365 since the beginning by the provision of cloud-based apps as well as offering the possibility of mobile business intelligence through a number of new BI offerings that extend what was already available through its Power Pivot and Power View capabilities.