Announcing Azure Analysis Services general availability
Today at the Data Amp event, we are announcing the general availability of Microsoft Azure Analysis Services, the latest addition to our data platform in the cloud. Based on the proven analytics engine in SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services is an enterprise grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform, offered as a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Azure Analysis Services enables developers and BI professionals to create BI Semantic Models that can power highly interactive and rich analytical experiences in BI tools and custom applications.
The success of any modern data-driven organization requires that information is available at the fingertips of every business user, not just IT professionals and data scientists, to guide their day-to-day decisions. Self-service BI tools have made huge strides in making data accessible to business users. However, most business users don’t have the expertise or desire to do the heavy lifting that is typically required – finding the right sources of data, importing the raw data, transforming it into the right shape, and adding business logic and metrics – before they can explore the data to derive insights. With Azure Analysis Services, a BI professional can create a semantic model over the raw data and share it with business users so that all they need to do is connect to the model from any BI tool and immediately explore the data and gain insights. Azure Analysis Services uses a highly optimized in-memory engine to provide responses to user queries at the speed of thought.
Azure Analysis Services is the latest addition to the Azure data platform. It integrates with many Azure data services enabling customers to build sophisticated analytics solutions.
Since we launched the public preview of Azure Analysis Services last October, thousands of developers have been using it to build BI solutions. We want to thank all our preview customers for trying out the product and giving us valuable feedback. Based on this feedback, we have made several quality, reliability, and performance improvements to the service. In addition, we introduced Scale Up & Down and Backup & Restore to allow customers to better manage their BI solutions. We also introduced the B1, B2, and S0 tiers to offer customers more pricing flexibility.
Following are some customers and partners that have built compelling BI solutions using Azure Analysis Services.
