Acumatica have launched a content pack for Power BI, announcing the release at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. In delivering this integration Acumatica have avoided the necessity of developing their own analytics and reporting package and can reap the benefits of the Microsoft development efforts.
Acumatica have developed their OData interface so that the data within Acumatica is exposed appropriately within Power BI. This means that only data that users should have access to is exposed within Power BI. Individuals without the relevant privileges will not be able to retrieve data from the relevant tables. Acumatica have a brief tutorial to explain the process in more detail here.
Acumatica goes on stage with Microsoft
Microsoft will also be pleased to have integrated another software vendor’s data into Power BI. The platform is still in early life in some ways and the more vendors they can bring into the fold the more successful they are likely to be.
James Phillips, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s business intelligence products group, commented: “I’m excited to be on stage with Acumatica at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to show our partners the Acumatica Power BI content pack. Now Acumatica customers can use Power BI to analyze and visualize their ERP data in minutes with pre-built live dashboards and reports.”
Who benefits most?
It is the Acumatica customers that will benefit most from this announcement though as Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill commented “…Power BI adds a powerful new dimension to our Cloud ERP product, giving real-time data and insights that legacy systems struggle to provide. And when we say we will deliver, we deliver. And this content pack for Power BI is proof of our competitive advantage.”
Once set up the content pack allows Power BI to retrieves data from Acumatica including opportunities, accounts and customers enabling the building of dashboards and related reports based on that data.
Customers need to be running a minimum version of Acumatica v5.2 for the integration to work. The overall process is simple and Microsoft already have the knowledge base(KB) article. There are 17 Knowledge Base (KB) articles for content packs online at Microsoft, including Dynamics and Salesforce. While Acumatica may not be the first ERP solution to integrate with Power BI, if Microsoft is able to gain market share with the product this integration will help both parties.
