Microsoft has announced a new Azure based service that provides data visualization and dashboards on multiple data sources.
Microsoft touts their Power BI service as “a cloud-based business analytics service (software-as-a -service) for non-technical business users”. The service allows users to drag and drop connections to multiple data sources both in the cloud and also in local files such as Excel. Dashboards include visual data representations, geographical representation, and natural language query features. In the future the service will support native apps on Android, iOS, and Windows.
“Connect to your data in minutes, with built-in connectors and pre-built dashboards and reports from a wide variety of sources including GitHub, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SendGrid and Zendesk. More are coming in the next few months including Inkling Markets, Intuit, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Sage, Sumo Logic, Visual Studio Application Insights, Visual Studio Online, and many more. And Power BI is “hybrid” by design, so customers can leverage their on premise data investments while getting all the benefits of our cloud-based analytics service.” — Microsoft Blog
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