Enterprises are starting to follow a data culture that integrates information from many sources and drive business decisions. For such an approach to succeed, it requires everyone to function on a single data platform, and BI tools to leverage vast quantities of data quickly. 

Here is a list of options in Power BI to integrate your enterprise BI needs and enable business analysts to leverage data more easily. 

Simplifying data preparation and uniting data access

Data preparation and modeling are important parts of business intelligence services. The two components often account for most of the time users spend working with data. Here are the capabilities of Power BI that decrease the time to work with data and fetch insights. 

• New features in self-service data prep 

With the Power Query option, you can ingest, transform, and integrate big data in the Power BI web service. This includes data from a large set of on-premises and cloud-based data sources, such as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Excel, Dynamics 365, SharePoint and Salesforce. The ingested data can be shared across multiple Power BI models, dashboards and reports enabling easy data reuse. 

• Integrated AI and analytics with Azure 

It is necessary that everyone in the organization operate on the same data. Now the data access between Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Power BI is even more integrated. Business analysts can seamlessly work on data stored in Azure Data Lake along with the self-service capabilities of Power BI. And, they can also delegate access to insights with AI and analytics from Azure Data Services like Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Databricks. 

• Common data model 

With Power BI you can leverage a standardized collection of data schemas (attributes, entities, and relationships). You can either choose a standard schema or a customized schema. The schema enriches your data from third parties and accelerates the analysis across a broad and integrated dataset. 

Uniting self-service and enterprise BI 

Managing data from multiple sources can be quite challenging. Similarly, managing multiple BI platforms within the same company would limit the access to insights. Power BI provides the ultimate solution as a modern and compliant platform for business analytics. 

• Enterprise-scale BI models & application lifecycle management (ALM) 

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is now integrated with Power BI. This option enables larger data volumes, third-party BI tool connectivity, and lifecycle management. Higher dataset size limits and incremental refresh enables customers to work on large-size datasets, while maintaining quick reporting. 

With additional support for the XMLA protocol, the Analysis Services tools is used for managing the application lifecycle. So, from operations till deployment you can work with Power BI datasets. Since many BI tools support XMLA, Power BI can now boost analytics across the enterprise irrespective of the type of reporting tool used. 

• Enterprise reporting 

Popular SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) technology is now part of Power BI, creating a unified, secure, enterprise-wide reporting platform accessible to any user across devices. Paginated reports can now be added along with Power BI’s interactive reports. 

• Multi-geo compliance 

You can deploy Power BI Premium in specific global regions so organizations can meet data residency requirements and improve performance of data loading.