Introduction and APIs
It's less than a year since Microsoft launched the current version of Power BI, its self-service business analytics cloud service. The service gets weekly updates – for example you'll soon be able to see your Power BI dashboards on an Apple Watch or inside Cortana.
It now has over five million subscribers and corporate vice president James Phillips calls it "arguably the world's most widely delivered business intelligence tool". It's so popular that Microsoft sold out a recent conference covering the service without spending any money advertising it.
It's also been very popular with software developers who wanted to be able to build Power BI into their own software. "Every software company sees the same thing," Phillips told techradar pro, "data is exploding and the ability to take that and do interesting things with it so you can provide more productive apps is the opportunity everyone wants to embrace."
So now, as well as users being able to take a dashboard of charts, graphs, tables and other reports that they've built in Power BI and embed it live on a website, developers can use a new Azure service, Microsoft Power BI Embedded, to take the features of the Power BI service and put them into their own apps and services.
APIs aplenty
They do that using APIs that send data to Power BI, which creates and renders reports that they can display. "We have an API for embedding which gives you the ability to get data out of the Power BI service, a control API that allows you to interact with the service so you can create artefacts like dashboards and data sets, and an API that allows you to push your own data into Power BI to work with," Phillips explained.
"That permits you to do almost the complete range of what's possible in the user interface [of the existing cloud service]. One area we have a bit more work to do on is automating the creation of brand new reports or dashboards. We decided to start with reports and cloud data and quickly fill in everything else you can do with Power BI today.
"We focused on reports to start with rather than dashboards because reports are the magic. Dashboards are a great way to, in real-time, stay current, but interactive reports and the ability to slice and dice and cross-filter and ask questions; that's what we uniquely provide."
Phillips further claimed: "Power BI Embedded on Azure provides an off-the-shelf solution that has far more power than any one software vendor building a vertical application could do." And Paul Maher, the CTO of Milliman, told techradar pro the same thing.
Power BI shortcuts
Milliman is one of the biggest actuarial consulting firms in the world, but it has fewer than ten people in its tech support team because the firm has built its ETL, analytics and reporting service using Azure PaaS services.
"We don't want the overhead of infrastructure," insisted Maher, "the operational cost of that is immense. We want a cloud pricing model. We're a modern data warehouse that's a hyperscale service in the cloud – we provide big compute to actuaries who upload models into our platform and run on tens of thousands of cores.
"We pull assets from various accounting systems, data of all shapes and sizes into the cloud. When the data is on-premise, it's locked into compartments. Moving it to the cloud gives them a lot more accessibility."
Milliman wanted to add visualisation features but didn't want to build them from scratch. "There are complex things happening with the financial modelling and with Power BI, the actuary can visualise the data and that integration really lights it up for them. If we had had to build this, it would have been a horrendous amount of work," Maher says. "There are things we wouldn't even have thought of in Power BI and we're able to embrace them and pass that on to our clients, so we can push forward at a great rate."
Huge scale
Milliman is expecting to need the scale of Azure for customers – some companies need to provide quarterly reports to regulators and that can mean building a dashboard view that requires running 10,000 calculations. "You have to bring all your data together for these regulatory reports," explained Tom Peplow from Milliman. "For some businesses we're working with, it's the first time they've had a single view of all their data. They've got 20 mainframes and now we've got one data set that describes their entire business."
Acumatica is also embedding Power BI. Phillips describes them as a "midmarket ERP SaaS service that competes with NetSuite. They were constantly being beat up by NetSuite because they didn't have good reporting and analytics technology. By integrating with Power BI they leapfrogged NetSuite – now they've got far richer reporting, including natural language reporting, and they didn't have to dedicate any of their engineers to building it. They didn't have to become an analytics software company to get this."
Phillips says "dozens and dozens" of companies are going to embed Power BI in their own tools – it could start showing up in services you use pretty quickly. Maher says it only took the Milliman team two weeks to integrate it.
Business are already using the many software packages built on top of the Reporting Services in SQL Server but Power BI Embedded reinvents that for the cloud world, Phillips told techradar pro. "A modern app platform for business has to bring three things together. There's analytics, Power BI, showing you the needle of what's happening in your business, and then there's modern applications that allow you, procedurally or declaratively, to move the needle.
"The next step is some orchestration that allows you to start the process of automating the movement of that needle, including analytical systems that make recommendations humans can take into account when they make decisions. When you bring those things together, you've got a powerful platform and Power BI is one of the ingredients."
Part app, part platform
Being able to use Power BI inside third-party apps and services makes it not just a cloud service, but a platform. Office 365 and Dynamics already offer similar options – DocuSign uses Office 365 services to look up email addresses for users from their Outlook contacts list and even checks for out of office messages before you send a document for signing, in case it's an urgent document.
It's the kind of thing we should expect to see for all of Microsoft's cloud services, Phillips said. "I'd argue that if you look at all our SaaS services and our finished applications, we will always seek to provide the application which is the finished product and grows the market, and then also offer it as a service to build on. This is core to how we think about our services: part app, part platform."
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