Power BI Tops 5 Million Subscribers, Amps Up with New Features

Microsoft at this week's Microsoft Data Insight Summit announced that it has crossed the threshold of 5 million Power BI subscribers. The Data Insights Summit is the inaugural Power BI and Excel user conference, pairing users and Microsoft's Power BI and Excel product development teams in attendance.

Microsoft VP James Phillips on the company's Power BI blog reported from the Summit that the company has added several new features to power BI that "make it even easier to analyze data and share insights with Power BI." These include capabilities that deliver enterprise readiness; deepen integration with Excel; and enhance intelligent data exploration.

Phillips describes an "explosion of data," which is estimated to reach 50 zettabytes or more by 2020. We had to look that up, and one zettabyte or ZB is 1 billion TB ad 1 trillion GB.

It all has to go somewhere, and says Phillips, that would be the cloud. It is:

[The] only practical place to glean and disseminate insights from the diverse data surrounding us, a view reflected last year when we unveiled "the new Power BI" as a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering for business users.

That growth is also behind Microsoft's cadence of weekly service updates and monthly desktop updates to Power BI, all based on community feedback.

That community feedback is a sign of Microsoft's improved customer-centrism, and behind Microsoft's being named one of just three leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant of BI vendors, released in February. As Gartner described the new ...