The Why of Report Server

[Anonymous]

Our business has recently crossed into Power BI Premium due to the growth of demand in this product.  Along with Power BI Premium is the license to use the Power BI Report Server.  A few google searches has given me a high level idea of what Report Server can do, but i'm left with a question of why would i do it?

Clearly this is a great product that businesses are using and thus it must be a need.  So when my managers ask me "Why should we go through the effort of spinning up Power BI Report Services when we have regular Power BI?", what would you tell them?

[v-qiuyu-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Power BI Report Server is available as part of Power BI Premium and compatible with SSRS reports, allowing the deployment and distribution of interactive Power BI reports—and traditional paginated reports—on-premises within the boundaries of an organization’s firewall. 

The same Power BI reports you create for Power BI Report Server can work in the Power BI service and even continue to query your on-premises data via the On-premises Data Gateway, so when you’re ready to adopt the cloud, you can take your reports with you and take advantage of the Power BI service’s additional features such as Dashboards, real-time/streaming data, natural-language query, and more.

For more information, please go through online document about Power BI report server: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/reportserver-get-started/

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu 

[Jon-Heide · Accepted solution]

Two reasons:

1. There are some features PowerBI Report Server has, but PowerBI.com does not. Such as Paginated reports, Folders, etc.

2. You company or policy precludes you from putting your data into the cloud and need full control of your environment.