Microsoft Unveils BI Roadmap

Today at the SQL PASS Summit 2015, Microsoft shared its BI roadmap for next year and beyond. The BI cloud roadmap shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s centered around Power BI. The main takeaway about the on-premises roadmap is deemphasizing the role of SharePoint and Office in favor of Reporting Services. In SQL Server 2016, SSRS will be extended to support Datazen reports. A future SQL Server update would support publishing Power BI Desktop files as well.

“Just as we’ve added mobile report delivery to SSRS in SQL Server 2016, we intend to add governed Power BI Desktop report delivery in the future.”

Although this news will surely cause some commotion in a short term, I believe it’s a good news for customers and BI practitioners in a long term. For customers, you no longer need SharePoint and SQL Server Enterprise licenses if all you need is sharing some reports and dashboards. So, this move brings significant cost savings in both software licenses and operational expenses. However, if you have invested in SharePoint you can continue using its BI features in SharePoint Server 2013 and beyond. For BI practitioners, you no longer need to deal with SharePoint complexities. MVP and the community have been asking for years for a simplified deployment model and now we have it. And removing SharePoint and Office dependencies will remove adoption barriers caused by aligning release cycles across different Microsoft product groups.

I’m personally glad that SSRS was chosen as the workhorse of the on-premises BI roadmap. SSRS is a mature product and it’s a natural choice to step up to its new role. Apparently, it’s not trivial to decouple the Power BI Service from all the Azure backend infrastructure so we can host it on premises. Long live SSRS!