Happy First Birthday to Power BI!

[Jessica]

One year ago, on July 24, 2015, we released the new Power BI service, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI Mobile as an innovative cloud-based business intelligence solution. At the time of the launch, Microsoft Corporate Vice President James Phillips wrote that “Power BI sets the standard for modern business intelligence”, and since that day we’ve continued to maintain the same commitment to quality as we’ve developed and updated the entire Power BI product.

But it hasn't all just been updates to the existing tools! In the past year we have delivered a complete platform that developers and our ISV partners can build their businesses on. We’ve introduced the Power BI Embedded service, open sourced our visualization stack to let customers build their own Custom Visuals and provided a set of powerful REST APIs to enable data management and realtime data scenarios.

We've encouraged the growth of data journalism with publish to web and the Data Stories Gallery. In March we came together with you at the first Data Insights Summit to learn more about business analytics and network with each other.

The market response to Power BI has been outstanding. In February, 2016, Gartner positioned Microsoft as a Leader, for the ninth consecutive year, in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. Power BI was also featured as key BI platform in the Forrester Wave evaluation of 2016, and shared top marks in PC Magazine’s “Best Self-Service BI Tools of 2016” article. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “uses the service constantly” to run Microsoft itself!

And then there's the Power BI community, who continually inspire us. Registered Community members will receive a 1 year birthday badge on their account today, and we've got a very special Community Birthday Block Party coming later this week. The community in turn has already started celebrating Power BI's birthday, including the creation of this very touching video:

We want to give a huge thank you to all of our users. Power BI would not be the product it is today without your ideas, your feedback, and your support. In the last year its been our privilege to not only grow a business intelligence product, but also a community movement.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Power BI celebration without some data. Below are some fun numbers from the last 365 days, and an excellent report created by Calgary Power BI User Group member Tyler Becker about all of the feature releases over the past year. (Available full-screen as well.)

Power BI by the numbers

• As announced at the Data Insights Summit, the number of organizations that use Power BI has grown from 45,000 in July 2015 to over 200,000 today
• Over 326 blog posts have been published here – almost one for every day!
• 30,000 hours of training have been delivered each month since the launch of the Guided Learning portal
• Almost 12,000 BI experts have joined the Power BI Community, and they’ve given out 10,896 “kudos” to their forum peers and voted 51,327 times for new feature ideas
• 13,200 tweets were sent by presenters, attendees, and livestream viewers during the Data Insights Summit
• 48 reports have been shared on the Data Stories Gallery since its launch a few weeks ago
• There were 535 total updates to Power BI in the last year

As you can see, it has been an amazing year for Power BI, and you've been an amazing community. Again, we're giving a great big thank you from the Power BI team to all of our users. Here's to the next 12 months!