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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Maintain data accuracy and security

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.

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Learn more about Microsoft business intelligence products and services

Power BI

Bridge the gap between data and decisions with easy-to-use reports that appear wherever decisions are made.

Power BI Embedded

Offer your customers world-class analytics without building them yourself.

Azure Analysis Services

Browse massive amounts of data using a fully managed platform that provides enterprise-grade data models in the cloud.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs through a unified experience.

Solution architectures

Enterprise BI in Azure with Azure Synapse Analytics solution architecture

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

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

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Frequently asked questions about Microsoft BI solutions

  • Business intelligence is the process of analysis of business information (strategies and tools) to make sense out of business data.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.