Power BI Premium Gen 2 Previews Scaling, Per-User Pricing

• Power BI Premium previews a new architecture that resolves performance issues and simplifies management, potentially helping to reduce cost.
• It offers similar security levels but uses multitenant resources, and upgrading to the new architecture is mandatory.
• New packaging includes a Per-User subscription option with a lower entry price, providing an alternative for smaller deployments.

The Power BI Premium business intelligence (BI) service will receive a redesigned back-end architecture. The new design, called Gen 2, resolves performance issues and memory limitations experienced by many customers, simplifies the deployment and design requirements, and could help reduce cost. A side effect is that Gen 2 allows Microsoft to offer a Premium Per-User subscription that reduces entry costs for smaller deployments that need advanced features only found in Premium.

Power BI Premium Overview

Power BI, Microsoft’s BI product family, includes several integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components that are used to build data models and datasets and create and share reports, dashboards, and other BI content. Power BI offers multiple back-end hosting platforms, which include online services and an on-premises server product that enable publishing and distribution of shared datasets and reports, processing data to produce (render) reports and metrics, managing user access, and delivering reports through clients.