Microsoft has released the December update of Power BI Desktop and several updates of the Power BI service.
Microsoft is moving quickly to take the cloud market of BI services, which is still relatively unexplored (most companies still keep their data on premises), and is the only mainstream player providing a credible story of integration between cloud and on premises BI services,
Microsoft is leveraging many assets (the Tabular engine, Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and many other Azure’s based services. Its weak point has always been where other BI vendors focus the “last mile” of data visualization and presentation. That is being addressed with acquisitions like Datazen.
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 will be a huge release for the BI services. SQL Server Analysis Services is a very important release, being the first major upgrade since SQL Server 2012 for Analysis Services Tabular. There are many new features that will make Tabular a more “enterprise ready” platform. The magic key will be “Hybrid BI”.
SSRS will play an important role of the on-premises BI portal. integration between SSRS 2016 and Power BI will allow users to pin SSRS report items to Power BI dashboards. You can test pinning reports items to Power BI with SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.0 and later. The newly released CTP 3.2 also features the new sleek SSRS portal. Power BI is has become a focal point for cloud hosting of the main MS report artifacts i.e.: Power BI reports, Excel reports, and SSRS reports.
Last week Microsoft introduced mobile reports along with SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher, a new desktop app to to design and publish reports. You can now download a preview version of Mobile Report Publisher.

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