
Microsoft Monthly Newsletter – January 2025
04/02/2025Check your SKU – You may only have 90-days to act.
For customers utilising Power BI capacity SKUs, sometimes referred to as P-SKUs:
Microsoft have been making changes since July 2024 to consolidate Power BI into Microsoft Fabric by retiring the Power BI capacity SKU and replacing it with Microsoft Fabric capacity SKUs.
For those not aware, Microsoft Fabric is built on the existing Power BI platform and provides an all-in-one data platform with AI-powered services to accomplish any data project. Microsoft Fabric is a superset of Power BI Premium; meaning it has all the capabilities of Power BI Premium plus a range of additional workloads, giving access to a data end-to-end SaaS-based solution.
Jim Manis, Vice President of Product Management at Microsoft, has provided some succinct information on this change and what the impact means:
“…with reservation SKUs now available for Microsoft Fabric, we are announcing the end of life for the Power BI Premium capacity SKUs. Depending on your existing agreement, the retirement will impact you differently:
- New customers will not be able to purchase Power BI Premium per capacity after July 1, 2024.
- Existing customers without an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will be able to renew their Power BI Premium capacity subscriptions until February 1, 2025. Customers who have a renewal date after February 1, 2025 will need to replace their Power BI Premium capacity subscription purchase with the purchase of Fabric capacity at the end of their agreement.
- Customers with an existing EA agreement can continue to renew their Power BI Premium capacity purchase annually until the end of their EA agreement. If the end of the existing EA agreement is after February 1st, 2025, they will have to transition to Fabric capacity once the agreement has ended to continue using Microsoft Fabric.
- Customers on a sovereign cloud will not be impacted by this retirement as they do not currently have access to Microsoft Fabric. We will provide additional information as soon as it’s available.
All existing customers will be able to purchase more Power BI Premium capacity on their current agreement until its end date.” Microsoft’s update is available here
To clear one misconception up, this does not impact Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium per user (PPU) licencing – these continue as normal.
One crucial element to this is that once your Power BI capacity SKU reaches retirement depending on the scenario above, you must purchase Fabric capacity and migrate, and you will have 90 days to do so. For some customers this 90-day clock would’ve have started this week.
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At Ultima, we’ve been proactively working with our existing customer base that this impacts, but also providing them with Microsoft Fabric proof-of-concept solutions due to them being given access to an entire and modern data platform solution through this change. This has seen significant benefits of adoption and acceleration of data & AI capabilities to these businesses by working with our experts. In short – you’ve got it, so why not use it? And we can get you there at pace with our experience and guidance.
If you’ve got any questions about this retirement, smoothing the migration, or how to accelerate your data platform requirements, reach out today to our team today to see how we can help.