Microsoft Power BI Partner Solutions Begins a new Era Today!

Historically, the BI add-on solutions such as custom visuals have been very challenging to monetize for Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners across all BI platforms. But Microsoft’s announcement at the Inspire conference today on enabling direct transactability and license management ushers in a new golden era for everyone – ISV partners, Customers and Microsoft.

With this new approach, Partners can focus on building and supporting their solutions, while Microsoft will take care of subscription billing, e-commerce, license enforcement, and renewals.

Here is our perspective on how it is a win-win for customers, partners and Microsoft:   

1. Customers can now try and buy partner visuals directly from Microsoft, and administer license procurement & usage seamlessly through a trusted framework. They can manage licenses for custom visuals just as they can with Office 365 licenses. Organizations can also buy licenses in local currencies with credit cards, or through purchase orders & subsequent invoicing. This greatly removes barriers to procure custom solutions.  
2. For Partners, the ability for customers to directly buy from Microsoft eliminates a long sales cycles and vendor onboarding challenges. Partners also benefit from the simple and attractive commercial terms.
3. The move helps Microsoft strengthen the leadership in the BI ecosystem by making it easier for both customers and partners to get what they need – which will encourage more partners to build add-on solutions. 

Why Power BI is an attractive Platform for ISVs:

Market Opportunity: Microsoft Power BI has been an undisputed market leader for the last 15 years and is used by over 300K+ organizations worldwide. Power BI adoption and penetration will continue to grow as data volumes and the need for business insights continues to grow. It doesn’t get any bigger than Power BI in terms of ISV partners looking to build innovative and niche BI & Analytics solutions

SDK/API Maturity: Microsoft Power BI has over 300+ AppSource Visuals in the marketplace and an excellent SDK from its early days. When you look at the breadth and depth of AppSource Visuals that are available today – It is a reflection of the early vision to invest in custom visual SDK and APIs, and maturing them over the years will enable new ISV partners to bring their solutions to market quickly

Partner Focus: Microsoft is very committed to its partner’s success. As with the culture – The Power BI team has a dedicated organization that maintains, nurtures, and is vested in partner success.

We expect more organizations to drive productivity & performance through our offerings

Lumel Technologies (Formerly Visual BI) - has been building add-on solutions on top of BI Platforms since 2011. Today we serve over 2,000 customers globally in driving business productivity and performance management with our add-on solutions on top of Microsoft Power BI. With over 150+ full-time employees dedicated to innovating with Power BI - we are the most significant player in this category with over 25+ premium AppSource visuals.

Lumel has worked closely with the Microsoft Power BI team to bring these two highly sought-after Inforiver solutions as part of this public preview announcement for customers.

1. Inforiver Matrix  Excel like reporting, analysis, and data input capabilities
2. Inforiver Analytics+*  Explore, visualize, and manage performance through 40+ advanced visualizations and advanced storytelling capabilities. 

Today, we can’t imagine any iOS or Android device without a paid app. Very soon, partners can dream of a day when every single Power BI customer is running at least one partner app on a daily basis. Today’s announcement is just the beginning of a new era for BI & Analytics, and for independent software vendors like Lumel who build solutions on top of Microsoft Power BI.

To learn how to set up, pay for, and manage licenses for custom Power BI visuals purchased from AppSource, refer to this article.

We are happy to share our journey and learnings with ISV partners who want to bring their solutions into the Power BI ecosystem. Feel free to connect and reach out to me via LinkedIn.

*Inforiver Charts has been renamed to Inforiver Analytics+, a 3-in-1 visual for dashboards and storyboards. It offers 50+ charts, cards, and tables.