A recent, Microsoft Ignite 2020 announcement of a new licensing plan for Microsoft Power BI, called Premium Per User, or Premium Gen2.
We already have license options for:
Per user Pro
One of the most common licensing options is the Power BI pro account, that gives the user enough access to do *almost* anything they want in the world of Power BI development, building solutions, creating workspaces in the service, sharing the content to the users, etc. This licensing is priced $9.99 USD per user per month.
Good enough to cover the analytics needs of a small to medium scale business with usual analytics requirement. Requirements such as getting data from multiple sources, combining it, building superb visualizations and sharing among a reasonable number of end-users.
Premium: capacity-based
Another popular option is to purchase a dedicated capacity (a dedicated node of certain amount of CPU cores and RAM power) to host the Power BI content on it. The dedicated capacity comes not only with a better performance, but also, with extra features. Such as using AI abilities, some extra features in the dataflow development, geo replicas for the data model, paginated reports and many other features. Dedicated capacity comes in two modes; embedded, and Premium. and the minimum entry for Premium is $4,995 USD per node.
Good for enterprise scale businesses with advanced analytics requirement, such as working with big data, building computed entities in the dataflow, leveraging AI functionalities, and requiring high performance for their big data analytics.
Pro is cheap enough to get every business started with analytics, and Premium is powerful enough to cover sophisticated analytics requirements. However, there is a large group of small to medium scale business which have advanced analytics needs. Premium capacity-based licensing for this group is too expensive. For a company with l only 10 to 20 users, there may not be an ROI to pay $4,995 per month for analytics. On the other hand, Pro is too limited. They need some features that are not available in this licensing.
The details of how much the licensing would cost are still to be determined, as the licensing for Premium Per User, or Premium Gen2 will come later this year (2020). It means that a small scale business can pay for the analytics requirement with a per-user licensing , which may be a worthwhile option. That means business can scale with advanced analytics features like an enterprise customer.
