Boost your business intelligence with Power BI on Azure

The best business decisions often come from the best data insights. And now, even the smallest company recognises the need for excellent analytics in order to beat competition. Big data is no longer reserved for big business.

But business intelligence doesn’t just rely on data itself: knowing the right questions to ask and having the right tools on hand to provide the answers in a meaningful way is integral for any organisation.

If having a unified platform on the cloud to view your most important data sounds useful, you may be interested to know you may already have one in the productivity tools you use every day. Power BI is a business analytics service that allows you to constantly monitor the your company’s key business drivers using a variety of handy apps and products, all combining to create a great reporting platform.

This suite of analytical tools helps you understand your data and share insights. A dashboard provides a 360-degree view of a business’s most critical metrics, updated in real-time and accessible across all your devices. Your dashboard can be personalised too: up to 60 business applications can be connected to your dashboard, each providing unique visualisations to help you build a picture of your company’s operations. Think of a whole host of productivity and business process apps, all brought together delivering information on sales, revenue, or ROI – whatever you’ve programmed your apps to provide – to populate a fuller report. Or if you’d prefer, pre-built dashboards are available to help you get up and running quickly.

Mobile ready

Reports can be reviewed anywhere thanks to Power BI Mobile apps, which updates your analytics automatically. Native Windows, iOS, and Android apps are all touch-optimised so you can interact with your data, and you need never miss important information, as you can control data-driven alerts straight from the dashboard. What’s more, the ability to share live reports and dashboards keep you and your colleagues on the same page (literally).

Desktop delivered

Analysts who require a more feature-rich platform can flex their creative and productive muscles as much as they like on the Power BI Desktop. It’s an elegant end-to-end solution for building any analytical profile, allowing users to connect, shape, visualise and share insights; Power BI helps to make data analysis much simpler, and is designed to help you to take back hours in your busy day. Think of all the hours in the day spent connecting disparate databases or web services, maybe, or fixing formatting issues. Power BI can iron out these creases: separated files are combined with visual tools to help you easily check for problems or trends.

And any data sources can be brought together, whether it’s is in the cloud or on-premises: Power BI gateways connects SQL Server databases, Analysis Services models, and other data sources to your personalised dashboard(s). Plus, there are over 20 built-in visuals alongside a library of custom visualisations created by our user community to help you create a report that reflects your business.

Multi-faceted solutions

And these reports can be used by every department.

• Financial performances, broken down into specific regions can make decision making faster for finance
• IT teams can connect Power BI to other tools, as well as integrating it into any existing solutions for a streamlined approach to data analytics
• Marketing gurus can analyse campaigns in real-time, comparing actual revenue, costs and ROI for segments and channels
• Even the HR community can use Power BI to monitor the progress of an individual against growth and role-based metrics.

In order to get the business boost out of Power BI that your organisation deserves, however, it makes sense to align it with the industry-specific solutions on offer.

If your clients operate in retail, being able to compare and contrast footfall graphs, for example, can help solving customer shopping patterns crucial to any future decision making. The energy sector can view regional energy usage status’ and forecast future usage based on incoming data allowing companies to optimise their operations.

Many other industries can use Power BI in their own ways: insurance; airlines; manufacturing; consumer-packaged goods; telecoms, the list goes on – data is a universal currency in today’s world, but the metrics they provide can be used in countless ways. And service organisations that serve these industries need to speak the same language.

Level up your intelligence

Indeed, succeeding in a data-driven economy today means being able to speak the language: can you bring together many different sources of information, collate them to make understandable visuals that bring the data alive to your colleagues or customers, and then utilise what they show to drive your decision making in the future?

If the answer isn’t “yes” to all of those things, don’t worry, that’s why we’ve made Power BI. It’s a solution to level the playing field, to allow any team, no matter its size or technical know-how, to enjoy the benefits of data-driven business intelligence once only reserved for big business.

Find out more about PowerBI here

Learn using PowerBI with Azure can take your analytics to the next level