SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft executives showed off a new set of tools from Acumatica during the company’s second day keynote at its Build Developer conference in San Francisco this morning. The Seattle-based cloud ERP provider unveiled a new content pack for Microsoft’s Power BI application that lets users better process data from Acumatica.
The content pack allows users to bring information from Acumatica into Power BI to take advantage of the latter’s capabilities when it comes to visualizing and filtering information, so it’s easy for people to see information like the number of sales made in different cities.
Thanks to the integration, Acumatica and Power BI users will be able to take advantage of the cross-platform features in Power BI. Microsoft Chief Developer Evangelist Steve Guggenheimer and Technical Fellow John Shewchuk showed how it’s possible for users of Microsoft’s forthcoming massive Surface Hub display to run natural language queries by writing them on the whiteboard-sized screen with a special digital pen.
It’s a part of Microsoft’s push to expand the power of its Office applications through new developer tools that allow third parties to connect their apps to the larger Office ecosystem. Extensions like this one have the potential to be a win-win for both parties: Microsoft gets to add more value to its platform and developers get access to a broader range of customers.