This video contains some thoughts and speculations about what 2019 holds for Power BI, based on various announcements made by Microsoft during 2018, and drawn from my experience.
Power BI is part of a suite of products that is semi-officially known as the Power Platform that is aimed at increasing the productivity of non-IT department power users. The other products in the Power Platform are Flow and PowerApps, and I would expect there to be more integration between Power BI and these two products in the future.
Enterprise BI will also be a major theme of Power BI in the future. While Power BI is often seen as a purely self-service BI tool, one of its strengths is the way it works well with Microsoft’s enterprise BI tools linked to SQL Server and the Azure cloud. These links will strengthen, and Power BI itself will get more enterprise-focused features such as support for source control. Power BI Premium will also become a more compelling choice for enterprises.
Dataflows are another major new feature that will appear in Power BI in 2019. They will help organisations centralise their ETL and they will also become a central area for other cloud-based services to export data to and in which to further enrich data.
