Business intelligence
Realize the value of organizational data by transforming it into insights so everyone can make decisions based on facts instead of opinions
Make sense of your data through Microsoft BI solutions
Business intelligence (BI) solutions from Microsoft help any organization transform data into intelligent, easy-to-understand visualizations that are surfaced wherever decisions are made.
Offer everyone in your organization—from business analysts and BI professionals to business users—powerful, self-service analytical and enterprise BI tools that drive better, faster decision making. Pin your most relevant content, use the Power BI mobile app, and embed reports in collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint so data is there to support your decisions.
Prepare and model data with ease through built-in automation and intelligence. Bring your data to life through hundreds of data visualizations, AI-powered features, and branding options so your report fits your users. Distribute findings to team members inside and outside your organization so everyone works off the same information.
Create amazing data-exploration experiences that look and work like the other Microsoft technologies you use every day so you can get started quickly. Use our library of data connectors to access popular cloud and on-premises sources such as Excel, SharePoint, Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365, and Salesforce, and add others.
Business intelligence systems use your most valuable business data and require stringent security and privacy capabilities. Apply protection to your business intelligence data to help prevent data loss. Better safeguard your data so that it meets the compliance standards and certifications for your industry, while using national clouds to meet local regulations on service delivery, data residency, access, and control.
Learn more about Microsoft business intelligence products and services
Solution architectures
Enterprise BI in Azure with Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse is a distributed system designed to perform analytics on large data. It supports massive parallel processing (MPP), which makes it suitable for running high-performance analytics.
Advanced Analytics Architecture
Transform your data into actionable insights using the best-in-class machine learning tools. This architecture allows you to combine any data at any scale, and to build and deploy custom machine learning models at scale.
Get the latest business intelligence resources
Business intelligence changes how organizations make decisions
"As we grew, we needed something more dynamic, more visually appealing, and more user-friendly for our colleagues. Power BI fits the bill in all of those respects."
Paul Silvester: Delivery Manager, Metro Bank
"We have insight, accountability, transparency, and the ability to democratize data throughout the organization—we're empowering everyone to make better decisions."
Edson Crevecoeur: Vice President of Strategy and Data Analytics, Miami HEAT
"The power of Power BI is that… the data speaks for itself and lets physicians draw their own conclusions without any intervention from administrators."
Sébastien Landry: Director of Medical Affairs, Hôpital Montfort
"Our goal is not data for the sake of data, but to embrace the cloud and analytical technologies to deliver more expert insights to the right stakeholders at the right time."
Richard Beasley: Senior Enterprise Architect Data Services, Rolls-Royce
"The data from our Azure SQL Database is used across the organization using Power BI dashboards and visual analytics. This gives our employees access to information from our data warehouse across multiple dimensions in a very seamless fashion."
Nipun Sharma: Analytics Architect, Business Technology and Systems, Komatsu Australia
"With the system dashboard, we can look in one place to understand more about direct customer feedback, see key metrics around how the system is performing, and [see] whether or not it's resolving customer problems."
LaChelle Porter-Ainer: Head of Digital Support and Contact Centers, HP
Frequently asked questions about Microsoft BI solutions
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Business intelligence is the process of analysis of business information (strategies and tools) to make sense out of business data.
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Data visualization brings data to life through live dashboards, interactive reports, charts, graphs, and other visual representations to help you find key business insights quickly and effectively.
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To start discovering insights from your data, you need two things: a business intelligence tool and a data source. After you connect your tool to your data source, you can begin creating data visualizations. These interactive visualizations help users understand what is really going on so they can make informed decisions.
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Power BI is designed to work where decisions are made, so dashboards can be surfaced almost anywhere. Dashboards are available in the cloud, on-premises, and on mobile through native apps. Dashboards can also be added in collaboration tools like Teams and SharePoint, to websites, or to SaaS applications like Salesforce and Dynamics 365. The easy-to-understand dashboards can also be added to PowerPoint presentations.