"With Excel and the new Power BI for Office 365 service, we think customers will experience ease of data usage across the entire organization.”

Eric Sonntag, Strategic Alliances, Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) is a leading provider of commercial information and business intelligence (BI) to organizations worldwide. The company wanted to analyze and deliver data more efficiently internally and to customers. To make that happen, D&B partnered with Microsoft to implement Power BI for Office 365, which gives users the ability to shape and visualize data from within Microsoft Excel. Some D&B employees and customers now have BI capabilities using familiar tools, making data easier to use and accessible to more people.

Business NeedsDun & Bradstreet (D&B) is the world’s leading source of commercial information, with a global database containing information on more than 225 million businesses.

The organization offers data solutions in two broad categories. The first is D&B Risk Management Solutions, which help customers mitigate credit and supplier risk and drive profitability. And the second is D&B Sales & Marketing Solutions, which offer data and research on companies, executives, and industries to assist customers in conducting effective sales and marketing campaigns and converting prospects into clients.

D&B delivers licensed data to customers in a variety of ways, including via API (data-as-a-service), File Transfer Protocol, or even hard media. Delivering data from within a familiar environment such as Microsoft Excel represents a user-friendly way for D&B customers to access, and then shape and visualize their data.

Because D&B wanted to analyze and deliver data more efficiently internally and to customers, it decided to invest in a new BI solution.

SolutionA longtime Microsoft partner, D&B was given early access to Power BI for Office

Customer: Dun & BradstreetWebsite: www.dnb.comCustomer Size: 4,600 employeesCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—Data services

Customer ProfileBased in Short Hills, New Jersey, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) provides data and insights about businesses that customers use to make credit, sales and marketing, and supply chain management decisions.

Software and Services Microsoft Office− Microsoft Excel 2013

Services− Microsoft Office 365− Power BI for Office 365 − Power Query for Excel− Widows Azure Marketplace

Technologies− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data

Quality Services− Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Reporting Services

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Data and Analytics Firm Makes Data Easier to Use and More Accessible with Cloud-Based BI Solution

365, a cloud-based solution that works from within Microsoft Excel 2013 spreadsheet software and Microsoft Office 365 to give users the ability to do their own data analysis and shaping.

Using the solution, workers can perform advanced data analysis using Power Query for Excel, and they can easily visualize data in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Power View, a feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services. “When we first saw Power BI and Power Query, we thought that this was a natural environment in which to provide our data to customers,” says Eric Sonntag, Strategic Alliances, Dun & Bradstreet.

D&B decided to collaborate with Microsoft on new data solutions for D&B customers. “We are a Microsoft customer, and they are a customer of ours, and we saw that there was a lot of synergy to be had between both organizations,” says Ginger Tulley, Senior Director Marketing, Strategic Alliances, Dun & Bradstreet. “By working together, we thought we could use Microsoft BI tools and D&B data to solve our customers’ business problems.”

D&B created several data services and made them available on Windows Azure Marketplace. The firm’s Business Insight service gives customers the ability to filter data in order to build a list of companies for sales, marketing, credit, or supplier management purposes.

As an example, a maker of solar energy systems planning to expand nationally can access data via the D&B API, giving a database administrator access to multiple data sets. The administrator can use D&B data to identify the fastest-growing construction regions in the United States and publish that information in Power Query.

A business analyst at the firm can go into Power Query and enrich the data with specific contact information for construction

businesses, found via an API. The analyst can then publish the contact list to a Power Query BI portal, making it viewable by sales and marketing employees. Those employees are able to upload the list into the company’s CRM database and prepare to execute a growth campaign. “All of those users, from the administrator to the marketing team, have the opportunity to massage and filter the data in Power BI, right from their desks,” says Tulley.

In addition to creating solutions for customers, D&B also implemented Power BI for Office 365 internally to a small group of analysts, who use the tools to quickly access and analyze data from the company’s many data sources.

BenefitsWith Power BI for Office 365, D&B employees and customers can use familiar tools to gain new BI capabilities, and data is easier to use and accessible to more workers.

Gives Workers Powerful BI Capabilities Using Familiar ToolsWith Power BI for Office 365, D&B employees and customers will have powerful new BI capabilities, accessible from applications they use every day. “Using Power Query in Excel, database administrators can make specific data views easily available to other departments throughout the company, and that facilitates really powerful collaboration,” says Tulley. “As an information worker, it’s great to have this functionality at my fingertips. I not only get the discovery, but also the analysis and data sharing in one integrated solution using the tools I'm used to, such as Excel. I find it very empowering, and I think our customers will respond in the same way.”

Makes Data Easier to Use and Accessible to More PeopleOnce the new BI solution is more widely implemented in a customer site, it will simplify data analysis and visualization.

“With Excel and the new Power BI for Office 365 service, we think customers will experience ease of data usage across the entire organization,” says Sonntag. “It will be very easy for them to discover and access data, and analyze and transform that data.

The solution will also give more employees access to data for analysis and visualization. “Previously, it was complicated for a customer’s sales and marketing group to get access to data from the database administrator,” Tulley says. “But now, the administrator will be able to simply create a link to a view in Power Query, and marketing employees and other groups can get that data right away.”

This case study is for informational purposes only.MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2014