Microsoft’s Gemini Project and the Excel add-ons that birthed Power BI
Today, Power BI (“Business Intelligence”) is a platform that provides self-service analytics in a package familiar to Excel, SharePoint and well integrated to Microsoft Office ecosystem. It boasts a growing and variety collection of connectors that can seamlesslay interface with other systems in order to extract data from anywhere.
It originally began as a secret project code named Gemini at Microsoft in 2006 under Amir Netz. Gemini took the power of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and made it available as in-memory engine. In the years to follow, Microsoft would release several features as Excel add-ons that would ultimate group and shape into the platform it is today.
In 2009, Gemini was renamed to Power Pivot and released as free excel add-on from Microsoft.
In 2010, Power Pivot gained traction with the help of Rob Collie’s PowerPivotPro.com blog and Excel business users. Power Pivot provided additional data modeling capabilities and ability to mash up large volumes of data. As it gained popularity, Microsoft took notice and invested more into BI toolset.
In 2012, Power View was released as part of SharePoint. It was Microsoft’s attempt to deliver amazing report visuals in the browser similar to Tableau.
In early 2013, Data Explorer was released as an Excel add-on and later renamed to Power Query. Power Query is a data preparation engine that helps you transform and clean your data as well as ingest different sources of data as queries.
Having Power Query and Power Pivot available as Excel add-ons made them accessible but it caused problems when sharing files with lots of data. It was possible to install Power Pivot together with Microsoft SharePoint and create a central place for Power Pivot to work and refresh data. However, with growing datasets and additional requirements, it was getting cumbersome.
In January 2015, Microsoft announced a new Power BI Service that could be accessed at PowerBI.com. Although in preview mode only, over 500k individuals jumped onboard to test it and the team employed a rapid development cycle to release new features fast.
At the time, the product was called Power BI Designer Preview. The application combined Power Pivot Data Model, Power Query and Power View so users can build reports offline and upload to the service.
In July 2015, it exited the “Preview” phase and entered “General Availibility”. Those were some seriously fast sprints!
Today, the Power BI team still continues to deliver monthly releases as part of their overall roadmap and enhance the experience for business analysts. In addition, they keep members up to date and involved within the Power BI community forums.
