Microsoft has bolstered Power BI several times already since the business intelligence service became generally available in late July, but on Thursday it announced a particularly interesting partnership with Alteryx.
The new partnership will help users of the Alteryx Analytics 10.0 platform to output their data to Power BI for visualization and further analysis by a wide range of business users.
Alteryx also offers in-database blending within SQL Server 2014, enabling data analysts to combine multiple sources of data within the database through its easy-to-use workflow. Data remains in the SQL Server environment and blending takes place there, Alteryx said, speeding the delivery of results.
Power BI gained new competition this week in the form of QuickSight, a new business intelligence tool launched by Amazon at its AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.