Microsoft's Power BI for Office 365 Generally Available

Microsoft has today announced that their next generation of self-service business intelligence, Power BI for Office 365, is now available for public consumption.

Provided as a subscription service add-on, Power BI seeks to bring the power of data retrieval and management to Office 365 customers. Power BI enables business customers to pull raw, unstructured data from available data sources including those contained in Windows Azure and also on-premise data stores, and reformat it into meaningful information for analysis and visualization.

Microsoft has unveiled the service with promo pricing for those customers E3 and E4 customers and is priced at $20 per user per month. The promo pricing is good until June 30, 2014 when it reverts to the original $33 pricing structure. A Power BI subscription can also be purchased for $40 per user per month for a standalone license for those who already subscribe to Office 365 ProPlus and $52 per user per month for those not currently subscribed to Office 365.

You can purchase the service or sign-up for a free trial (includes 25 user licenses) on the PowerBI.com web site.

Released in August 2013, Microsoft provides a Windows 8 app for Power BI.

Read more about Power BI on our sister site, SQL Server Pro. Power BI content on SQL Server Pro