Microsoft is making some interesting moves lately with its new data analytics platform PowerBI. 

On tuesday this week they announced that they had acquired Datazen Software, a company with mobile-friendly business-intelligence (BI) tools.

PowerBI is currently in a technical preview (freemium) mode and it is available as a public preview to basically anyone that would like to try out the new tech.

There have been multiple improvements to the application as well during the preview, launch and updates that have been released.

Some of these improvements are additinal connectors to different data services such as a google analytics connector. They have also added more operators for filtering and dealing with dates, automatic model relationship detection, and many performance and speed improvements and bug fixes in the application.

Microsoft is making a new and also welcoming approach as it announced not only that they are bringing business intellegence through the powerbi application, but also down to mobile and iOS as well supporting iPhones and iPads.

On the iPhone Power BI app the ability to perform data driven alerts provide interesting insights to the data from the service.

It seems that more connectors are being created all the time positioning Microsoft as a force for consuming and analyzing data from just about any service. I am hopeful that they will continue pushing for more services to be added and consumed for data analysis.

If you haven’t signed up for a free trial you can do so, just type in microsoft powerbi preview in your favorite web search engine and you will be presented with all the marketing info.