Power BI grew massively from its “PowerPoint for Data” self-service roots at launch back in 2015 into the leading enterprise BI software of the 2020s. This is why Gartner has ranked it consistently as a Leader in the top right of its famous Magic Quadrant. And while Power BI might be best known for its reports and dashboards, this is just the tip of the iceberg and there’s so much more to it than the visual layer.
At iLink Digital we have grown our Power BI practice all along and we developed a sophisticated set of services to meet customers where they currently are, spanning requirements such as:
- Teaching entire workforces how to adopt a data-driven culture.
- Delivering data securely based on complex business and regulatory requirements, with multilingual solutions working globally.
- Integrating Power BI with the entire Power Platform, Microsoft 365 and the new Fabric Software as a Service (SaaS), in order to build comprehensive productivity solutions.
- Working seamlessly in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Delivering exceptional performance for some of the biggest data models in the world, at multi-billion row scale.
- Deploying Power BI in a variety of embedded environments for internal or external audiences.
iLink is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a Data & AI Azure Solutions Partner and a Fabric Featured Partner and was recognized as the Power BI US Partner of the Year twice in a row. We’re proud of our accolades and technical chops but we think it’s even more important for us to be good at listening to you in order to understand where you’re coming from and what you want to accomplish. We put a significant emphasis on business acumen, domain knowledge, human factors and user experience.
Describing the Art of Possible & Exploring Tradeoffs for Power BI Newcomers
We guide organizations that have had little to no exposure to Power BI to discover what the platform can do:
We can help you jumpstart new projects that are unencumbered by legacy constraints, by establishing a strong foundation and exploring Power BI features most suitable for your use cases, including Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) functionality. Such “greenfield” projects should put their primary focus on functional requirements and business use cases.
We have extensive experience migrating entire organizations to Power BI from other BI platforms including Qlik, Tableau, Business Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, Domo, OBIEE, OAC and others. In such “brownfield” cases, technical and operational constraints are significantly greater than when you start from a blank slate.
Pushing the Envelope with Existing Power BI Deployments
Some of our clients have been using Power BI for years and know the platform well already. They face new challenges ranging from self-service governance at scale to premium capacity monitoring to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflow concerns. Most organizations also come to realize that it’s a full-time job to keep up with the changes brought by Microsoft every month.
Governance, Organizational Change Management, Training: It’s About People
We recognize that business intelligence projects, like all IT projects, need to start and end with business goals, take organizational constraints into account and ultimately can only succeed if your people are fully onboard.
Our approach to governance and implementation planning focuses on several key success factors:
Mapping your organization and understanding key stakeholder groups informs architectural decisions, helps plan expenditures and guides enablement plans.
Defining data security policies ensures proper access to data, exposing useful information while protecting confidential data (PII/PHI) from unwanted exposure. This covers the gamut of Row Level Security (RLS), Object Level Security (OLS), Dynamic Data Masking (DDM), Entra ID/AAD group management and other technologies that together ensure that the right data is shared with the right people.
Training and enabling end users ensures that widespread adoption will happen on a faster timeline, empowering more people to make better data-informed decisions.
Our Governance solution includes a thorough sequence of assets to make your implementation successful:
- Organizational Change Management (OCM) plan
- Center of Excellence (CoE) & Community of Practice (CoP) establishment
- Release communication plans
- Training plans
- Well architected patterns
- Premium capacity planning
- Workspace strategy and guidelines
- Development best practices
- Pre deployment checklists
Leveraging Microsoft’s Best-in-class Integrations
One area where Power BI arguably reigns uncontested is its breadth of integration capabilities across the entire Microsoft platform:
Microsoft has created an ecosystem of hundreds of custom visuals for Power BI. We leverage them on a case-by-case basis for requirements including advanced mapping, forecasting, planning and other needs unmet by the default visuals. We have established a partnership with Lumel, the largest Power BI custom visual vendor reputed for their excellent Inforiver, ValQ and Charts offerings to meet FP&A and other sophisticated use cases.
Power BI is part of the Power Platform, a set of services that brings workflow automation (Power Automate), no code/low code development (Power Apps), chatbots (Power Virtual Agents) and easy website creation (Power Pages) to millions of knowledge workers without a formal IT/development background.
Power BI works beautifully in combination with Teams, SharePoint, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, making business intelligence accessible to anyone in the applications they already use.
Last but not least, Power BI is now part of Microsoft Fabric, an ambitious all-encompassing data platform that makes Power BI even more powerful.
Charting Power BI’s Future within the Fabric Platform
iLink Digital is one of few partners who have been involved with Microsoft’s product team before the official launch of Fabric, an integrated SaaS data platform within which Power BI plays a central role. We are proud to be one of only a few Fabric Featured Partners recognized by Microsoft following the successful proofs of concept we executed with Fortune 500 customers. Now that Fabric has reached General Availability, we’re already taking Fabric to production.
Fabric puts data orchestration pipelines, data lake storage, Spark notebooks, lakehouses, warehouses and much more just one click away from Power BI. Our experts can help you explore these possibilities and integrate them in your plans depending on your existing infrastructure and challenges.
Find more about Fabric and how we can help you explore its impact on the Power BI roadmap and broader potential through our dedicated page.
Working in Hybrid Environments with a Mix of On Premises and (Multi) Cloud Resources
Most large organizations have started adopting the cloud yet are far from having retired all their on-premises infrastructure, nor do they necessarily plan to do so. We will help you optimize your data infrastructure choices and costs, taking into accounts considerations including networking latency, bandwidth, egress costs, or requirements for data gateway clusters.
Many of our clients use multiple cloud data platforms. We can make Power BI work for you beyond the Microsoft ecosystem, with sources including Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce and many more
Embedded Scenarios for Internal Portals and ISV Solutions
We have deep expertise with Power BI Embedded (PBIE) both for internal use (User Owns Data) and for external clients (Applications Owns Data). iLink is one of three companies currently working with Microsoft on a PBIE accelerator multi-tenant solution for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). On such projects we bring a combination of application development and data skills.
What’s Next?
We run many workshops, free trainings and events with Microsoft throughout the year in the United States and globally. Check out our list of events to connect with our experts and your peers in a city near you. And to discuss your next project with our team, contact us today!
