Business transformation and optimization are major drivers behind cloud adoption today. Azure, Microsoft's public cloud, is the fastest growing public cloud platform in the world. Azure has emerged as a leader in the public cloud space given its emphasis on innovation, enterprise scalability, and security.
"Last night, we had a happy hour to celebrate burning Joe's Excel spreadsheet."
Those were the exact words out of the mouth of the Director of Marketing at a global med-tech company based in Minneapolis. Just a few months earlier, Beyond Impact helped deploy a Marketing Intelligence Solution leveraging Power BI to migrate an Excel spreadsheet that essentially ran the entire Retail Marketing division. This Excel spreadsheet was held together with duct-tape and elbow grease, leading the client to say, "there has to be a better way to work with our marketing reports."
I've recently produced a couple of scripts that produce large, in memory objects that they're storing out to a CSV file as they go. My thread counts for Powershell are running high as I'm looping through several instances of these larger objects. Although my CPU and Memory are fine per the Resource Manager, the script is running very slowly and the thread count continues to rise.
Growing up in a small town near Lake Mille Lacs, a good 90-minutes north of the Twin Cities, much of my learning as a little boy happened in a sandbox. Not the giant plastic turtle you see in Walmart today. Rather, an oversized wood structure filled with sand and a collection of old metal Tonka Trucks. I would spend the summer days building roads, bridges, castles, and rivers. I engineered high-security prisons for frogs I caught. I threw sand at my older brother and occasionally we tangled with a garden hose, much to my mother's displeasure. Every night I'd come in for dinner covered head to toe in dirt. Little did I realize, I spent those long summer days learning physics and engineering in the sandbox. I've always learned by just digging in. My childhood story really has nothing to do with Power BI - it simply points out the fact we can learn so much more when we get our hands dirty.
Have you given up on your New Year's Resolution already? Surprisingly (or maybe not), February is usually when people drop out of their "New Year, New Me" mantra. Reality sets in, the gym feels a million miles away at 5:00 am, maybe saving money is overrated. It's easy to talk yourself out of the whole thing.
We have all heard that sage advice since as far back as we can remember, "all that glitters is not gold." This rings true in data visualizations in Power BI. As part of our ongoing Power BI blogs, we are here to help you transform your business data into an engine that drives insights. Check out our full Resource Library for more.
The purpose of data visualization is to simplify, messy, and overwhelming data to solve a business problem. Enable decision makers to make insightful, data-driven decisions. To understand what great data visualization is, a good place to start is find out what it is not.
During my recruiting days - I naturally sought the thrill of chasing down the nearly impossible candidate. The type of candidate with a minimal digital foot-print, and a LinkedIn profile of fewer than 60 followers. The bulk of my time was spent seeking the ever-elusive mobile developer long before anyone had heard of Xamarian. Well before Microsoft's acquisition of the mobile cross-platform tool. Coffee meetings, technical user-groups, tossing around astronomical salaries. Or so I thought at the time. Emerging technology was driving this market and every organization was desperate to discover adequate talent.
I kissed my wife and three boys good-bye, and jumped in my car to begin my 269-mile trek across the border to Madison, Wisconsin. As a Minnesotan, we don't typically cross the border unless we have perfectly good reason. I was pondering my future. In the weeks leading up to this point, I had a few unique opportunities surface and was on the verge of accepting an opportunity to build a Microsoft Data, Analytics and Cloud practice for a company downtown Minneapolis.I had developed a strong belief in the "new Microsoft" under Satya Nadella and Microsoft's Data Analytics ecosystem - featuring products like Azure, Power BI, Machine Learning. I also could sense there was something special about the community of users - but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I mean, on any given Saturday ordinary people are freely giving up their Saturday to spend a day rubbing shoulders with their tech-peers and learning.
Just like a sports game, companies have to train hard, use the latest technologies and strategies to out play their opponent and keep their rankings.
