Power BI; a data canvas.

Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Elastacloud built out and published the Power BI Calendar last year and have continued to expand our business extending Power BI with custom visuals. Our approach is that with the right tools and the right approach you can make Power BI a data canvas - a technically complete and ready to go back end for data driven tools.

In typical development scenarios for BI, we host servers, integrate custom data tier code and build UI embedded technology. At each of these stages, custom code related to authentication in implemented, data contracts are exchanged and technology families are transcended. With Power BI, we get the opportunity to use the reporting canvas as a technology vehicle for wholesale replacement for data oriented BI delivery. You can embed your own technology, in every guise, right inside Power BI.

Furthermore, we believe that an immersive experience is the way forward for Data Visualisation and there will be brilliant solutions coming that combine 3d environments, augmented reality and holographic computing. The technical barriers are on the UI tier and not the back end analytics system, which PowerBI is the facade for a long chain of analytics technologies; and Elastacloud has been making great strides in solving these tiers with Power BI extensibility.

BISharp

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At Elastacloud, we built an SDK for controlling PowerBI with C#. It’s key goals are to simplify data access and authentication, allowing easy and rapid access to core PowerBI assets. We want developers to have an experience with PowerBI that is first class and help unlock the innate creative potential of developers. So many developers find getting their data across to end users in a clear way a difficult challenge and we think PowerBI is in a unique position to solve this. Unlocking the delivery of data and coupling that with the easy and extensible visualizations puts the power to innovate in a developers hands.

When we looked at the PowerBI toolchain we saw a few places that we wanted to help. We created the Calendar visual and continue to participate in the active community growing around the extending the variety of visuals available in PowerBI.

Then we looked at the other side, how to get data into PowerBI and control it in an automated fashion. There’s a really great API for that, but all the samples require the crafting of REST requests yourself. That’s not the hardest challenge in 2015, but it does slow down the development cycle which is a killer for creativity.

We set out with a simple challenge; create datasets and tables around .net objects (plain old clr objects - POCOs) and let a developer with an existing solution get creative with their data immediately. No intermediate EventHubs. No staging storage. A collection of class instances in memory, a PowerBI account to add them to … voila!

Wider Data Stacks

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At Elastacloud, we’ve been building data stacks for amazing companies for years. We choose the best technologies that fit our ethos of elasticity, focus, agility and economy in the cloud.

A key emergent trend in our customer is the notion of a wide data stack.

Data acquisition is the role of the data stack and the data stack much pull data into a pipeline, not respond as a push. Where eventing approaches are taken, the event source invokes an endpoint that the data stack owns.
Data is free to migrate between media in the stack, whilst being controlled by the overall data governance process.
Compute is applied over Data with great fluidity and flexibility. To support this, the wider stack supports execution in a family of compute environment and languages; from Hadoop to USQL to R.

To achieve this at Elastacloud we have a runbook;

Everyone has to be a polymath; from ML to BI
Data has to be governed
Access to data has to be controlled but free

To find out more; info@elastacloud.com