nc360° IT Management Magazine

12. November 2026

Power BI, Fabric Apps, or Claude?

Why the Data Model Determines Your Reporting

AI can now build dashboards in minutes. Since October, two new options for reporting and data analysis have been available alongside Power BI: Fabric Apps and Claude Dashboards. Many customers ask us whether this means Power BI has had its day. Our answer, based on our first projects and prototypes: no. Each of the three tools has its own purpose. However, none of them determines whether the numbers are correct—that’s decided by the underlying data model.

The magazine for digital optimists.

News from information technology, current trends in the IT industry, concrete projects of noventum consulting GmbH and its partners, dedicated commentaries and interesting events from the everyday life of IT management.

06. October 2026

Between SQL and Fabric: On the Path to a Modern Data Platform.

Many companies are in a transitional phase: While on-premises data warehouse environments continue to deliver reliably, demands for self-service, AI capabilities, and the integration of unstructured and semi-structured data are on the rise. In the Microsoft ecosystem, SQL Server (on-premises), the Azure Data Platform, and Microsoft Fabric overlap – leading to issues such as decision-making bottlenecks, fragmented proof-of-concepts, and inconsistent skill sets.

04. August 2025

Power BI and Microsoft Business Central: Efficient data integration for modern analytics

Integrated data analytics are indispensable for companies today. The combination of Microsoft Business Central and Power BI offers a flexible, powerful solution for analysing central ERP data. Business Central covers core processes such as finance, purchasing and warehousing and is deeply integrated into Microsoft 365. This article highlights how a direct connection can be established, what advantages it offers and where the challenges lie.

28. July 2025

"Chat with your data" – the new reality?

What if you could simply ask your data model: "Why is the contribution margin of product group XYZ so low?" - and get a well-founded answer? GenAI and tools like Claude, Copilot & Co. promise exactly that. But how well does it really work? And what does this mean for data experts, power users and governance? An experience report between fascination and responsibility by data & analytics expert Marco Nielinger.

27. May 2025

Chat GPT leads to project success – artificial intelligence supports ETL modernisation at nwb Verlag

nwb Verlag has been a valued customer of noventum for many years. In the publishing house's BI landscape, it worked classically with SQL Server, SSIS and SSAS - in our established DWH layer model, but not yet with the noventum Data Platform Accelerator (nDPA) and therefore with inflexible, layer-based loading via nested SSIS packages. The aim of a current project was to introduce the nDPA Orchestrator in order to modernise existing ETL processes and make them more flexible. However, before the orchestrator could begin its work, a tedious task had to be completed: the dependency analysis of around 500 SSIS packages.

15. November 2023

Sonepar inspires its employees with Power BI introduction

Photo: ©sonepar

In today's data-driven business world, data-driven decision making is crucial for global organisations. Sonepar Deutschland GmbH recognises the relevance of this approach and relies on Microsoft Power BI as an effective reporting and analysis tool. As a long-standing partner of Sonepar, noventum consulting already successfully helped to redesign and consolidate the company's central data warehouse in 2018. We have now taken the next step in our collaboration: the implementation of Power BI to improve reporting and analyses.

27. September 2023

Self Service BI or Shadow IT?

Companies are increasingly recognising the inevitability of Self Service BI (SSBI), but not infrequently they fail to implement it and therefore cannot fully exploit its potential. With this contribution we want to answer the following question: Which factors must be fulfilled so that the cooperation between the central BI organisation and users in the specialist areas - the so-called "power users" - works and both sides benefit from each other?

27. March 2023

How companies can use composite models in power bi as a game changer-for-self-service-business-intelligence

With Composite Models, Microsoft significantly expands the application spectrum of Power BI for business departments in companies. At the same time, a very powerful tool for self-service BI is created for the central business intelligence and IT departments in order to give the departments new freedoms and possibilities while taking their governance guidelines into account. The article is therefore aimed at both responsible and advanced users of Power BI Desktop in Controlling as well as those responsible in central IT or Business Intelligence. Used correctly, composite models open up a new world for self-service BI.

08. March 2023

TechNote: DeltaQ to ODP Migration

At noventum, we very often deal with the connection of SAP systems to Microsoft-based data platforms. Both on Azure with ADF and Azure SSIS or locally with SSIS and often with XtractIS from Theobald.

The supreme discipline of data extraction from SAP is the connection of data via SAP BI Content Datasources.

Why the Data Model Determines Your Reporting

The magazine for digital optimists.

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