Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence tool is getting opened up to more people. Today, Microsoft announced a preview of the next rendition of the service, which will be available for free with an added premium upgrade path.
The new version of the service, which can be accessed from any web browser, will allow people to take in business data from a variety of sources, including Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, GitHub and more, and transform it into useful visualizations. After it launches later this year, people will be able to use the basic features of the service for free, or upgrade to a $9.99 per month Power BI Pro account.
For now, Microsoft is making the next version of Power BI available as a free preview to anyone with a business email account. Here’s a video that offers a run-down of all the new features:
In addition to the new business model, Microsoft also launched a preview of Power BI for iPad in the iOS App Store today, and plans to release mobile apps for the service for Windows Phone, iPhone and Android phones in the coming year. Microsoft also launched a new Power BI Designer tool that lets analysts build dashboards from Power BI data, and then share them with other customers.
The tool is a key part of Microsoft’s push to help businesses wrangle the big data they’re generating. As more small and medium businesses want to tap into their information, the company has a huge market opportunity to take advantage of.
