Azure Hosted Tabular Data Model Service

Would be a great logical addition to the PowerBI service available. Having an enterprise tabular model with a single place to hold our DAX definitions and modelling logic would be valuable. Our analysts can access this cube on premise with Excel or in Excel Online workbook. Without a central tabular model in Azure, my analysts who wants to work in Excel (one of the greatest BI tools) against a cube would need to have the model (PowerPivot) embedded in their workbook. Once they do that, they need to worry about having a refresh schedule and a gateway online and available. I in IT need to worry about how to handle enhancement and bug fixes to that model that has been copied N number of times for each workbook. Our analysts like having an enterprise cube managed by IT (or Business power user), that they can connect to in Excel and build analytical reports (pivot tables/charts, slicers, etc.) and/or do ad-hoc analysis (drag/drop subtotaling, showing fields as % of, etc.) and share with others via One-Drive, network share, etc.

This would be great addition i.e the abilty to host large models in a paas tabular layer. We have some clients that want to use powerbi to query models containing billions of rows. Direct query to sql with these volumes is fairly sluggish and ssas hosted on a vm restricts a large amount of self service functionality. Having the same user experience coupled with the abilty to publish these large models would be ideal. A billing model similar to azure data warehouse would work well i.e separating cpu/memory consumption from physical storage. A model could be paused and hence unloaded from memory, or left running to ensure the model is always cached and hence immediately responsive to the end user. As a step further the idea of applying an mpp approach to ssas tabular where data is distributed across multiple tabular instances could allow for far greater volumes. Understand this would be a big architectural step, but could be great.