Embedded or Pro? Starting Power BI for customers

[houba139]

Background:

We are small-medium company (25 people), our business is implementation of a specific ERP system and custom modifications in that ERP system. Around two thirds of our customers are manufacturing companies, the rest is commercial and trading companies. We also developed our own manufacturing management system (or MES) running on Android. However, we were never really focused on reporting and BI in general. Now, we want to provide BI solutions to our customers – whole implementation – licensing, creation of reports as per the requirements and consultations (main data source on-prem MSSQL), publishing, administration, scheduled refreshing etc.. Our customers usually have 5-30 report consumers.

My biggest unknown is which way to go - Pro vs. Embedded App owns data

Should we invest time to learn develop with Power BI Embedded, so we can put iframes into to customers intranet site (not Sharepoint or Teams), so the app does the authentication against Azure AD. Or stick with the per user licensing (Pro), which is easy to assign to.

The way we create Power BI reports for customers now is to connect through Remote desktop to customers application server, install Power BI Desktop there and connect to database, create reports and publish them to their Power BI Service account, and install Gateway.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, when using the Embedded method, I could do the same except I would publish it to our company Power BI Service account with a Pro licence (to a specific workspace as per the customer for example) and pair the gateway installed on customer’s application server to our Power BI account. Then I would provide a token for the app to display the report. In this scenario, I’ll be the one paying for embed capacity, starting at 1USD per hour, right?. So the pricing for A1 capacity with 24/7 access to embedded reports would be around 750 USD per month.

We could limit dedicated capacity for 8 hours a day and only working days, so the price would be around 160 USD per month. Is this true? Can we manage the on/off for capacity so we can actually pay less?

If we dont have to pay the whole 750 per month, and pay around 160 USD per month, that would be more interesting because more then 16 report consumers is the turning point to go with Embedded solution and not the Pro license. I’m not anticipating that our customers would exceed the A1 capacity, but it is hard for me to predict at the moment. I'm assuming we would charge every customers the basic A1 capacity and track the activity for each customer, so we could increase the capacity if needed.

What is the way to go? So far I have not been forced to go with Embedded, but I’m wondering what is the best practices considering our company and our customers needs.

Thank you for any ideas/comments. And apologies for my English skills.

Edit : we are not working directly with ERP, we work with already pre calculated tables saved in the database.

[v-rzhou-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @houba139 ,

According to your statement, you create Power BI reports for customers now is to connect through Remote desktop to customers application server, install Power BI Desktop there and connect to database, create reports and publish them to their Power BI Service account, and install Gateway. I think it's a good way to do it, but it's not convenient. You need to connect to your customer's remote desktop for each maintenance.

Here I'll give you a closer look at Power BI Pro and Power BI Embed. 

If you use Power BI Pro, you can share your report to your end user. However, your end user also need Pro license to see the report, you shared with them. If your report is in P SKU Premium Capacity, though your end users are free user, they could see your report.

For reference: What is Power BI Premium?

There are two kind Power BI Embeds, Embed for your customers or Embed for your organization.

Embed for your organiztion(user owns data) :

The embed for your organization solution allows you to build an app that requires signing in using Power BI credentials. Once signed in users can only consume embedded content, they have access to on Power BI service. This solution is aimed at large organizations that are building an app for internal users.

Embed for your customers:

The embed for your customers solution allows you to build an app that uses non-interactive authentication against Power BI. Your customers are likely to be external users, and they don't need to sign in using Power BI credentials to view the embedded content.

You can select the embed method based on your requirement.

You can refer to this offical blog to learn which capacity you need to get for Power BI Embed.

For reference: Which SKU should I use?

A SKUs require no time commitment, and are billed hourly. 

For reference: Purchase Power BI Premium for testing

I hope this could help you to solve your problem.

Best Regards,
Rico Zhou

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