Power BI Desktop 1
Power BI Desktop

Microsoft will release its new Power BI software and online services on July 24, marking a new push into the increasingly competitive market for business intelligence tools that allow companies to visualize large and complex sets of data.

The release, announced this morning, includes a free version of the Power BI Desktop software. Microsoft’s move could put pressure on existing players, including IBM, Oracle, Qlik, Salesforce, Seattle-based Tableau Software, and other companies in the business intelligence and data visualization market.

James Phillips
James Phillips

James Phillips, a Microsoft corporate vice president, threw down the gauntlet in a post announcing the news this morning. “While other vendors charge thousands of dollars per seat for this class of software, we prefer to make it widely and freely available ultimately resulting in far more content in Power BI, which leads to a larger and more engaged end user community,” he said.

The company is also releasing its related Power BI business analytics service on July 24, including a pro version that runs $9.99/user/month.

Microsoft is also open-sourcing the Power BI visualization framework.

The company had a previous Power BI product for sharing Excel workbooks, but in an interview, Phillips called the new version “a fundamentally different beast that we believe is just orders and orders of magnitude more compelling.” The idea, he said, is to make data visualization accessible to a broader set of business workers, not just analysts and other business intelligence specialists.

The news this morning follows an extended preview period that saw Power BI used by more than 500,000 people at 45,000 companies, according to the company.

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