A solution from Microsoft to provide customer-facing reports, dashboards, and analytics in applications by using and branding Power BI as one's own. Designed to reduce developer resources by automating the monitoring, management, and deployment of analytics, while getting full control of Power BI features and intelligent analytics.
The scenario where it shines more is in the treatment of data that is not easily correlated at first sight, it helps to find causes of unsuccess in productive environments. The only thing that is required is to have properly collected data to feed to Power BI, so it won't be useful in environments where the data is not collected with care, since the representations won't be representatives of the reality.
Microsoft Power BI Embedded is already established as a de-facto standard as a business intelligence platform for the enterprise world. It comprises the best features to be delivered for the products being developed by providing a wide range of functionality. For instance, there are supported numerous graphic visualizations of data points such histograms, pie charts, heat maps and so on
Microsoft Power BI has had a positive impact on our business objectives by allowing everyone to better understand the data that is being presented. Some people can process numbers and charts easily, but interactive visualizations can aid visual learners and just makes the dashboard look a lot nicer with the ability to dive deeper into the numbers (through visualizations). Thus, engagement and understanding have improved.
One negative impact is that there is a rather steep learning curve since Microsoft Power BI's language (DAX/M) can be quite different from traditional Excel. Because of that, either you need to hire people who are specialized in Microsoft Power BI, or you need to account for the fact that they will need to be trained (or take time to learn it). Thus, there can be direct costs from hiring new people, or indirect costs through training/employee taking time to learn the software.
Another positive impact of Microsoft Power BI is that it got us thinking about how we can be better as an organization in terms of laying out our raw data, organizing data, conducting research into better metrics we can track and report on, etc. Because Microsoft Power BI made the presentation/visualization (+ regular updating/maintenance) part of our dashboard easier for us, we were able to start thinking about additional metrics and additional ways we can improve our reporting.
