1. Azure Analysis Services or Power BI – Which service fits you best?

2. Gabi Münster & Oliver Engels
Positions
GM: Teamlead Data Analytics at oh22data AG
OE: CEO at oh22data AG
Community
Gabi Münster & Oliver Engels
GM: MVP, Chapter Lead at PASS Germany
OE: MVP, Regional Mentor, President PASS Germany, Chapter Lead at PASS Germany
oh22data AG
Passion
/gabimuenster & /oengels
Both: Crazy about Data Platform
@SQLMissSunshine
gabi.munster & oengels
16:50

3. Agenda How do I find the right BI strategy for my company?
CIO
Well, we should start with a review of the near past…

4. Two years ago...
16:52
From:

5. CIO Looks promising. And this is the strategy you propose?
Well, you have to know a few things about Power BI in 2016:
Power BI is a closed system  No access to the data for anything but Power BI (or Excel)
Technical limitations, e.g. Dataset size
Not enterprise ready  No integration in any kind of application lifecycle management
So something needed to be changed...

6. Azure Analysis Server Services
One year ago...
Azure Analysis Server Services
16:55
Derived from:

7. Seemless integration Frontends Standard Users AAS Web Designer +
Enterprise Migration
Key User
Self Service BI
Enterprise BI
17:05 (showing Portal, Web Designer + Import + BISM Normalizer)

8. Demo
Seemless integration

9. Makes sense. Analysis services is known to a lot of people from on-premise. And with the integration strategy this looks good. So this is the strategy you propose?
CIO
Well, let‘s have a look at the changes of the last twelve months to Analysis Services and Power BI...

10. BI developer perspective
Which areas to look at?
BI developer perspective
Which new features do we have?
BI administrator perspective
What changed regarding scalability, maintainability, monitoring?
Developer perspective
What about integration with business applications?

11. BI developer perspective
Azure Analysis Services
New Memory Options ( )
Power BI
Aggregations
Bookmarks
Composite Models
Conditional formatting
Custom Connectors
Dataflows
Drill-through
Incremental Refresh
Many to many relationships
Q&A
SSRS Reports
...

13. CIO I already played around a bit with Power BI. Let me show you...
17:15

14. Demo
Composite models

16. BI administrator perspective
Azure Analysis Services
Scalability Whitepaper ( )
Power BI
Admin APIs
Incremental Refresh
Apps
Monitoring

17. Developer perspective
Azure Analysis Services
Rest API for asynchronous refresh ( )
NuGet packages for AMO and ADOMD ( )
Power BI
Power BI Embedded
Enable apps to programmatically use slicers
Error Event logging
Export to PowerPoint and PDF
Get data APIs
Model Parameters API
Phased embedding
XMLA endpoints opened
17:20

18. XMLA endpoints opened? CIO What does this mean?
It means Power BI will be opened up. The „hidden“ model will be accessible like a Azure Analysis Services model:
You can use Tabular Object Model / Tabular Model Scripting Language
You can connect with other Frontend tools
You can integrate the model into application life cycle management

19. In August we thought: Now we think:
17:30 (show Connection and deployment): Wir könnten hier auch die Connection zu Power BI Desktop zeigen
But I can show you how to interact with Azure Analysis Services instead.

20. Demo
XMLA connectivity

22. What will happen to Analysis Services?
Analysis Services has been in place for about 20 years and is still an important product.
Also Azure Analysis Services proved to be a fast growing service.
So Analysis Services will not be removed and we expect it to be supported for quite a long time.
But new developments will happen to Power BI first and not all developments will be shipped for Analysis Services as well. Power BI will become a superset to Analysis Services.
But if Power BI will cover all this and even has more modeling functionality what will happen to Analysis Services? Will it be deprecated?
CIO

23. Which picture do we see now?
Azure Analysis Server Services
Azure Analysis Services

24. Is Power BI the only choice left?
So finally you would say that we should use Power BI as our modelling tool?
CIO
Well, that wouldn‘t be a bad choice. But actually, it still depends.
Let‘s recap the current and future state of features and services.
17:32

25. Features and services today / roadmap
PBI Pro
PBI Premium
AAS
Scalability
- / -
X / X
XX / XX
Usage based cost management
App lifecycle management
- / ?
- / X
Availability of new features
This doesn‘t look that bad for SSAS...
True. And that is why we still need to figure out some facts before we can take a decision

26. Which questions should you raise?
Is this a fresh start or a migration of available structures (e.g. On-premise)?
How is the timeline?
How flexibly can I react to changes in functionality and timelines?
How important is it to get the newest features as quick as possible?
How is my usage behaviour regarding:
The timely distribution of report consumption?
The ratio of consuming users to Pro users?
The ratio of Power BI users to users of other visualization tools?
17:37

27. How to make a choice? Where do we start?
Completely fresh
Existing landscape
Which reporting tools do we plan for?
Only Power BI
Power BI and others
Other tools
How much do we use reporting?
24/7
8/5
Azure Analysis Services
How is our Power BI user structure?
Mostly
consumers
Mostly editors
17:40

28. Conclusion
At the current point in time AAS has some advantages regarding Enterprise readiness, but Power BI is catching up. Regarding new features and expectations Power BI looks more promising. Also existing gaps in Power BI regarding support for third party visualization tools are closed. AAS keeps the advantage of scalability and cost efficiency at a non permanent usage scenario. So usage and cost estimations are necessary. From our perspective business scenarios for both services exist and will exist in future. Even parallel usage might make sense, especially taking into consideration the possibility of using the same toolset. But a clear direction towards Power BI Premium can be deduced.

29. Don‘t miss the other sessions...
There are a lot of sessions delivering valuable content for Power BI and Tabular. This is just a small special MS extract, look for more 
Microsoft Power BI: The Future for Modern and Enterprise BI
(Thursday, 3:15 pm, 6B, Arun Ulagaratchagan, Amir Netz)
Microsoft Power BI: Distributing Insights and Governing Self-Service Analytics with the Microsoft Power BI Service
(Thursday, 4:45 pm, TCC Tahoma 4, Adam Saxton, Lukasz Pawlowski)
Building Enterprise-Grade BI Models with Microsoft Power BI
(Friday, 9:30 am, TCC Skagit 4, Christian Wade, Josh Caplan)
BI Power Hour
(Friday, 11:00 am, 3AB, a crazy bunch of people)
Modern Enterprise Reporting with Power BI Report Server & the Power BI Service
(Friday, 2:00 pm, 2AB, Chris Finlan)
17:45

30. Thank you