At the Microsoft Data Insights Summit today, the company announced the general availability of Power BI Premium. The service has been in preview since it was first announced last month. Like Power BI Pro, the Premium version of the data visualization platform comes with some added abilities.
James Phillips, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence (BAPI) platform, made the announcement today. The offering was created to give customers more access to critical intelligence across their organization.
As I discussed last month, Power BI Premium hides some features behind the new paywall. For example, users can no longer share private dashboard in the free powerbi.com version. Instead, they need the premium version to share in such a way:
“Power BI Premium enables the same number of virtual cores an organization provisions in the cloud to also be deployed on-premises without the need to split the capacity. Choose Power BI in the cloud, or maintain reports on-premises with Power BI Report Server and move to the cloud at your pace.”
In fact, all shared content for private users is now only available to paying customers. Microsoft explained why when launching the service:
“Consumers of content shared with them have the flexibility to be licensed individually with Power BI Pro, or with capacity in Power BI Premium when it becomes generally available late this quarter.”
Features
Power BI Premium gets a new Report Server feature. This gives companies the tools to store data safely behind a security firewall. Power BI Embedded and Power BI Service are converged in the Premium offering, improving the way content is embedded into apps.
Pricing for embedding with Power BI Premium is $625 and up.
Microsoft explained today that the new premium service is available through dynamic pricing. There are different capacity sizes, ranging across virtual cores and memory sizes.
