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Microsoft Power BI Blog

Announcing Power BI Premium Per User general availability and autoscale preview for Gen2

Headshot of article author Arun Ulagaratchagan

Corporate Vice President, Azure Data
2 March, 2021

The Microsoft Power BI team’s mission is to help our customers drive a data culture where everyone can make better decisions with data.

Power BI empowers every business user and business analyst to get amazing insights with AI infused experiences. With Power BI Premium, we enable business analysts to not only analyze and visualize their data, but to also build an end-to-end data platform through drag and drop experiences. Everything from ingesting and transforming data at scale, to building automated machine learning models, and analyzing massive volumes of data is now possible for our millions of business analysts.

By bringing capabilities that were previously only available to professional data engineers in IT organizations to analysts, we accelerate time to value, and we help put more power in the hands of business. With the centralized administration, governance, and security capabilities in Power BI, IT always has full visibility and control. This balance between business and IT is one of the reasons why the world’s largest organizations are increasingly standardizing Power BI and moving away from expensive, legacy BI products.

Power BI Premium provides unmatched capabilities in a single integrated BI platform without requiring customers to string together and integrate multiple products with high costs and disjointed experiences. Power BI Premium is available at $5,000/P1 node, which provides incredible value for customers with hundreds or thousands of users. However, one of the biggest asks from our customers, community members, and partners has been to introduce an entry price point for Power BI Premium at the per-user level, so it is more accessible to small and medium businesses and workgroups within large organizations.

After three months in preview, we are announcing that Power BI Premium Per User will become generally available on April 2, 2021, at a price of $20 per user, per month. For customers who already have a Power BI Pro license either purchased standalone or through E5, the price will be just an additional $10 per user, per month. Power BI Premium Per User is based on the new Power BI Premium Gen2 architecture which provides improved performance and lower TCO.

 

Power BI animation showcasing premium features such as Auto ML, XMLA, and deployment pipelines

 

Premium features and capabilities

  • Automated machine learning (AutoML) in Power BI enables business users to build ML models to predict outcomes without having to write any code. Forsyth County, the seventh-largest district in Georgia, uses AutoML to predict student’s graduation outcomes.
  • Power BI enriches your data with a rich set of functions from Azure Cognitive Services including sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, language detection and image tagging. Customers like Geocaching use sentiment analysis to understand sentiments in their members’ comments.
  • Power BI dataflows in Premium offers users no code data prep. This is the ability to prepare data for reports with just a few clicks using a visual interface. Power BI Premium’s enhanced compute engine automatically takes care of performance needs as data volumes grow and data prep steps can be stored as building blocks in Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for reuse across the organization. Grundfos is a pump manufacturing company that’s trying to improve the quality of life for people all over the world. Read additional details about how they are using Microsoft Azure and Power BI including dataflows and pioneering solutions for water and climate change problems.
  • Deployment pipelines help teams manage the lifecycle of their content so that they can develop and test their reports, dashboards, and datasets before it is consumed by users.
  • Pixel perfect paginated reports are available for operational reporting capabilities based on SSRS technology. Users can create highly formatted reports in various formats such as PDF and PPT, which are embeddable in applications and are designed to be printed or shared. Customers like Rockwell Automation have created a unified analytics platform using Power BI Premium.
  • Power BI datasets house the BI semantic models and are built on our AS technology that also ships in SSAS and AAS. We believe in open-platform connectivity and XMLA read/write capabilities enables management of this semantic model using not only Power BI Desktop, but any Microsoft or third-party client applications or tool. Arla Foods is the fifth-largest diary company in the world. Arla Foods uses Power BI datasets as rich semantic models spanning multiple subject areas.
  • Data volumes continue to grow exponentially and the need to easily extract insights for intelligent decision making prevails. Customers need solutions that scale to processing petabytes of data. Through large model support, Power BI datasets can store data in highly compressed, in-memory caches yield blazing fast performance over not just millions, but trillions of rows of data.
  • Power BI is the only BI platform to be natively integrated with both Microsoft Information Protection (MIP)and Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS). These advanced security capabilities go hand in hand with data encryption and data loss prevention. By default, Power BI uses Microsoft-managed keys to encrypt your data, and Power BI Premium enhances this by enabling you to bring your own key (BYOK). Learn more about Power BI’s security capabilities by reviewing our whitepaper.
We are also announcing new features to the preview of Power BI Premium. This update includes autoscale, which automatically adds a vCore to Premium capacity when utilization peaks and removes it when no longer needed. These cores can be charged to an Azure pay-as-you-go account. It also includes utilization metrics that provide consistent and reliable cost-management. These features will be rolling out to all regions through this week.

This short video shows customer excitement for Power BI Premium Gen2 and Premium Per User.

 

 

Learn more

Learn more about Power BI Premium today and check out all these capabilities in the Microsoft Ignite sessions below: