Microsoft has released a new free version of its Power BI set of business-intelligence tools for managing, visualizing and interacting with data. For those not familiar with Power BI, it is a cloud-based business analytics service (software-as-a -service) for non-technical business users. With any browser or a Power BI mobile app, you can keep a pulse on your business via live operational dashboards. You can deeply explore your business data, through interactive visual reports, and enrich it with additional data sources.

In order to start using Power BI, you'll have to enter a business email address. Then you can connect to your data in minutes, with built-in connectors and pre-built dashboards and reports from a variety of sources including GitHub, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SendGrid and Zendesk. More are coming in the next few months including Inkling Markets, Intuit, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Sage, Sumo Logic, Visual Studio Application Insights, Visual Studio Online, and many more.

A new tool – Power BI Designer, allows business analysts to connect to, model and visually analyze their data. They can then publish the results to any Power BI customer. Microsoft also released a preview of Power BI for iPad – now available for download from the Apple App Store. Later this year the company will also introduce iPhone, Android and Windows universal apps.

The Power BI is currently available to anyone with a US business email account for free, and support for international users to be in the works.

When th e product reach general availability, Microsoft will introduce a free offer, available as Power BI. A Power BI Pro version will be also available at a monthly price, with additional data capacity and features for the enterprise. In anticipation of this move, on February 1 Microsoft is lowering the price of its in-market Power BI service to $9.99 per user a month, a 75 percent reduction in price.