Power BI General Availability Coming July 24th

Microsoft on Friday announced that Power BI will be generally available July 24^th.

This culminates fully seven months of user input and incremental improvements. Microsoft in December released a Power BI preview, and closed it down in mid June to put on the finishing touches. The preview version added new dashboards, visualizations, a native iPad app and live "hybrid" connectivity to on-premise SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models. It also added support for integration with popular third party solutions like Marketo, zendesk, Salesforce, and GitHub.

Well, here it is at last, and "I think this is huge," wrote Dallas Salazar in Seeking Alpha, who observed that Microsoft wants Power BI to be "the platform for business intelligence across both SMB and enterprise deployment." Enhanced ability to tailor reports in Power BI Desktop (which until now was called Power BI Designer) can only drive adoption and use cases. And, Microsoft's adoption of burst development versus version iterations has proved it is listening to its user base, which wants to put its ideas to work now.

As for pricing, Microsoft will be sticking to its "freemium" model, with Power BI being free and Power BI Pro costing $9.99/user/month. For that you get all the functionality of Power BI plus collaboration tools, plus 10 GB/user ...