We are an SMB and have less than 600 users. We are trying, desperately, to migrate to Azure/365/PowerBi/Dynamics services to decommission many of our on-prem systems, unfortunately in many cases this is much more difficult than it would seem to be.
We have an on-prem deployment of SQL 2016, which we use SSDB, SSRS, SSAS and SSIS. Again, we would love to decommission this server and just move everything over to Azure/PowerBi, but the costs associated with spinning up the Azure services to replace our existing implementation of SQL are prohibitive to say the least.
Paginated reports, as per the original blog post are limited to Premium and A1-A4 Embedded (for dev/test) deployments for the preview and the near future. Per the comments in the blog post, this is due to architectural changes that would need to be made for Paginated Reports to be run on the PowerBi service.
Premium, and even the A1-A4 Embedded services, for SMB's are extremely cost prohibitive. There is no way that I can add $60,000 to our budget for a P1 instance, not for less than 600 users. This situation plays out the same in many other Azure services, we just don't have the financial ability to shutdown our on-prem systems no matter how much we want to.
We don't need "watered down" versions of the products, we just need services that are sized accordingly to the number of users that will be using the service. When 365/Azure started to come online, this is what I hoped that would happen, but the more mature that Microsoft's online services become, the more they are being developed with larger midsized and large corporations in mind.
Another user put in a PowerBi improvement idea with regards to enabling paginated reports in the PowerBi service and not just Premium or Embedded services, but I felt that this really needed some extra attention, hence this post.
For our company, having an on-prem deployment of SQL server just doesn't make sense any longer, but we have zero paths forward to fully decommission them.
