The digital revolution has sped up the data generation rate and made businesses adopt a data-driven approach. For modern businesses getting data generation at a high pace and in bulk can be a business growth opportunity. But this bulky data can only be beneficial if your business has a method to extract actionable insights. And that is where business intelligence solution comes into the picture. Business intelligence is a process that analyses and performs computing on raw data coming from various sources and makes them more insightful and actionable by generating intuitive, graphical data reports.

In the market, you’ll find many businesses' intelligent software or tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, Oracle Analytics cloud, etc., but among all, Power BI, a Microsoft Flagship BI software offers impressive features at a better cost. In this blog, we have stated everything that you should know about Power BI, from its introduction, process architecture, and graphical representations to benefits. So, let’s dive into the world of Power BI software solutions.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a tool comprising various software services, applications, and connectors, that represents your distinct types of data into visually simplified and interactive insights. It accepts data from multiple sources and formats, including Microsoft Excel workbook, cloud data, and on-premises or hybrid databases, by integrating them into a single format seamlessly. It connects with all data without changing their data representation at their sources and allows users to share with other users effortlessly. Microsoft offers three basic variants of the Power BI solution:

• Power BI Desktop – In the form of a desktop application for different OSs.
• Power BI Service – A SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model (Cloud-based service)
• Power BI Mobile – Available for both iOS and Android devices

Apart from these, Microsoft also provides another variant of Power BI, which is Power BI Embedded runs on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform allowing you to do the same operations as you can do on other Power BI solutions, but specifically helps in ETL (Export, Transform, Load) approach.

Power BI Applications and Services:

The above-mentioned Power BI solution’s variants/components are the core ones. But here, we have mentioned some more that you can use to benefit your business more.

• Power Query: Uses integrated data sources to retrieve and group certain data as needed.
• Power Pivot: It has a collection of tools to perform analytics on and model data gathered from internal data sources.
• Power View: Has a collection of tools that helps to represent data insights graphically.
• Power Map: Has a collection of tools and capabilities to represent Geospatial data in the 3D map model, which can also be exported to be used in the Power BI report.
• Power BI Desktop: It can be used with Power Pivot, View, and Query tools for better data representation.
• Power BI Website: As the name suggests, it is a web application allowing one to view and share Power BI solutions and applications. It enables you to create an intuitive dashboard by importing reports along with selecting the data category to show.
• Power Service: Allows sharing workbooks and data representation with other users. As it is integrated with data sources, its dataset automatically gets refreshed at certain intervals.
• Power Q&A: Allows to search or retrieve data insights by entering query statements in natural language.
• Power BI Mobile App: Users can use it to view the dashboard and report updates in real time as it is a cloud-based application. Available for iOS, Android, and Windows OS for mobile devices.
• Data Catalogue: For query operations.
• Data Management Gateway: Manages data refreshes at a certain interval, data feed, and table.

Power BI Architecture:

Here, the Power BI architecture represents steps that Power BI uses to deliver actional data insights. Speaking of which, Power BI architecture comprises three process steps:

• Data Integration: It integrates data (collected from various sources) into a single format.
• Data Processing: It analyses all data to find missing and redundant data. In the redundancy case, it only keeps a single file (mostly the latest version) and discards the copies.
• Data Presentation: It gets the final data refinement copy from the previous step and represents them in multiple graphical styles, in which users can select the one they understand the most. e.g., visualized dashboards, reports, etc.

Why Should Businesses Adopt or Use Power BI Solution?

1. It can be connected with various data generation sources, which update the data entry at every certain interval, thus, helping in real-time data analysis.

2. Customization of graphical/visual data representation is possible, which means users can decide the format in which they want to see their data insights and what categories they want to include or exclude (users can cut/slice or add categories on demand).

3. It provides a Quick Insights option, which lets you retrieve a particular dataset quickly.

4. If you’re using an SQL server and want to integrate it with a Power BI solution, for better security, you can set its connection to live/non-live as needed. As it supports on-premises, cloud, and hybrid server connection and all datasheet formats (such as xlsx, pdf, csv, etc.), you can say, it is an enterprise-ready business intelligence solution.

5. As you have seen above, it provides Power BI software availability for all platforms and different services for particular processes. This is what makes it a better choice for businesses ranging from startups needing limited Power BI support to large-scale enterprises needing excessive data analytics and intelligence support.

Get Your Power BI Solution Today:

Get a Power BI solution for your business and make the most out of it. Great! Looking for someone who can help you get this software, and do customization, administration, and asset management? At CloudStakes Technology, we have solutions to all your queries related to the Power BI services we provide. Have a look at our Power BI offerings. Need BI experts’ help in choosing the Power BI service stack? Book your free Power BI consultation with our BI experts Today!