Good to see that I'm not the only one who has exactly this feeling. For me NAV on SQL Azure together with Power BI/Pivot would be a perfect playground for modern reporting. But from Microsoft itself you hear almost nothing in this field. This is really sad. Regards Andy

Totally agree with your point

Agree. Guess they are also somewhat in dubio with solutions like Jet Reports. They kind of married some months ago, you are suggesting they get a divorce ;-)

Hi Cristi, Whilst I am very gratified to see your enthusiasm for Power BI & NAV, which you know I share from our meeting at Convergence, the title of your article and opening claims are not strictly accurate. At the NAV General Session Keynote – our highest profile session - I did a 15 minute demo of Power BI that was extremely well received by partners and customers. In the same keynote Erik Tiden, NAV General Manager, highlighted Azure, O365 and Power BI as the themes for NAV in 2014, as they were at Direction EMEA and USA in 2013. In addition to highlighting Power BI integration with 2013R2 in high profile demonstrations we also discussed Power BI extensively in the Concurrent and Interactive sessions at Convergence. You will be happy to learn that both customers and partners were very excited by what they saw. I should also point out that we only discuss the latest version of NAV at Conferences. For Convergence 2014 this was NAV 2013R2, which was released in Sep 2013, 5 months before Power BI was released in February 2014. So whilst we highlighted how well NAV 2013R2 works with Power BI and shared our excitement over the promise of Power BI, we did not have an opportunity to discuss what is in the pipeline for future releases. On a personal note, I am looking forward to seeing you at Directions and Convergence so we can continue our conversation in person but I am really looking forward to working with you to help us make sure that the Power BI and NAV story is amazing. Kind regards, Jonathan Davis Program Manager (BI) Microsoft Dynamics NAV This posting is provided 'AS IS' with no warranties, and confers no rights.

You know better than this Christian. You attend the events, maybe even the sessions sometimes. I know, I see you there. I understand that you are trying to make a living consulting and that this topic has been good to you recently, but you are a smart guy and can find a way to both advertise and keep it real simultaneously. Joe Little President, Jet Reports

From my experience in getting BI to work for SMEs and quick way to see their Return on Business Intelligence(ROBI, 3rd party BI solutions still the way to go. At least for now. SMEs , NAV target markets, do not have the patience to wait and build and try. They want it ready-made and modify. So, I would suggest taking a look at 3rd party BI products. They are usually ready to go in about 1 month and comes with ready-made cubes from GL, AR, AP, Inventory and FA.

Thou we will make no money with Power BI I truly believe that this is a great self-service BI tool. It’s hard to expect that Power BI will replace corporate BI or BI based on NAV. Corporate BI is data warehouse and/or OLAP cube based solution. It would be a great challenge to develop a corporate BI covering NAV application areas with Power BI as NAV architecture is quite complex. If there is some BI enthusiast developing a NAV based BI solution with Power BI right now he or she would get some good results in business area where net transaction values are measured (Sales, Purchase and GL) but will face many obstacle on areas where measures are based on balance (Inventory, Receivables and Payables). Beside that challenges with incremental load and security remain open in Power BI. Herewith pops up the question. Is it worth the investment? Good BI solutions are available for few thousand dollars. I am sure Power BI can extend corporate BI. We can foresee scenarios where business users would like to add some functionality to existing BI solution with tables from existing NAV or other private or public source. Business users would not need to call IT or IT vendor as Power BI can easily connect to cubes. Adding few new tables and linking them to OLAP based tables is easy and requires no technical expertise. Power BI is still a developing story both technically and commercially. Microsoft is still adding new features and trying to find optimal pricing. I am sure we will see more in the future. Mladen Gvozdenovic CEO, BI4Dynamics

Great and inevitable discussion... But, a few clarifications are desperately needed. This is good news, I assure you... read on. Power BI is not remotely the same as the full MSFT BI Stack on Sharepoint 2013. Power BI is a fine offering, for the right business, but there are SEVERAL elements which may prevent Power BI from being the right solution for some NAV Partners / Customers. ***Power BI is not the only (or best) route to the new MSFT BI toys.*** Specific differences from current on-prem MSFT BI stack include; 1. Data Model size limitations. 2. No Reporting Services option. No Tabular modeling option. 3. Row-level security 4. Security model is underdeveloped. 5. License model is expensive and for some is confusing to sell or buy. 6. Revenue opportunity for NAV Partners is limited. NAV Partners can absolutely make money with the MSFT BI stack... Consider the product gap in the MSFT BI offerings. Of the 100% of NAV customers, the vast majority will NOT have Sharepoint 2013 BI environments (a pre-requisite for current MSFT BI). And, the vast majority may not want to convert to a Power BI+O365 world, due in part to price, complexity, or BI limitations referenced above. So, how do you provide MSFT BI environments to these folks so the advanced BI functionality and reporting is there? Pivotstream is a cloud provider of pre-built, optimized Sharepoint 2013 + SQL 2012 + MSFT BI environments for hundreds of companies. Power Pivot and Power View have been our playground for the past 4 years. We have datacenters in the US and UK, and can provision a full-powered environment for you same day. And it is BYOS (bring your own storage) so Pivotstream is also a gateway to selling Azure. Oh, and if you want to hook it into Tableau, or other tools which work with SSAS, bring 'em. We hear this all the time, "NAV Partners just need the right canvas to work with." You need Enterprise power MSFT BI (full feature set), but at a cloud economic, with easy implementation to enable data governance, measure governance, end-user report design in Excel, integration with any other dataset (yes, companies have data outside of Dynamics!). Allow your customers to securely share insights with THEIR customers. To the NAV Partner community - if you have a NAV data model (or several)and you would like to repurpose them to new or existing customers, Pivotstream can help you drive recurring revenue, sell more Azure, AND extend a significantly more valuable reporting/BI option to your customers, all while keeping them in the Microsoft family of products. Jeff Elderton CEO Pivotstream www.pivotstream.com jeffelderton@pivotstream.com ps. You are about to hear a LOT from us on Dynamics BI in the Cloud.