It took us a while to get back to business as usual and have time to write about the Power BI Summit. We are fortunate that we have so many wonderful speakers, staff, and sponsors who helped us run this event, and the feedback we got was just amazing. In this post, I’ll share some information about how this biggest Power BI event of the year was.
Power BI Summit in Numbers
The Power BI Summit 2021 was the biggest gathering of Power BI professionals from all around the world that happened virtually. In this event, we had;
- 3,700+ attendees
- From 80+ countries
- Started with more than 3,000 attendees LIVE on day 1
- 100+ speakers,
- 100+ sessions
- A great contribution from the Power BI team.
- Five days, three repeats each day, eight tracks
Special thanks to our wonderful speakers
We couldn’t have done this event without the support and help of our wonderful speakers, whom we cannot thank enough.
Thanks to our amazing Sponsors
Sponsors are the heart of an event, and without them the event cannot happen. We thank our amazing sponsors, and encourage you to visit their websites and products.
Of course, Microsoft is our biggest sponsor for building such a great product, and the amazing support provided in this event from the entire Power BI team.
The keynote from Arun Ulag and Amir Netz
It was amazing to start the summit with a fantastic keynote from Arun Ulag (Corporate Vice President), and Amir Netz (CTO & Technical Fellow) at Microsoft Intelligence Platform and Power BI, interviewed by Kelly Kaye (Community Engagement Lead at Power BI).
Arun and Amir also had a Q&A with attendees later in the conference, which is public and can be watched here;
Eight Parallel tracks, Five Days, Three repeats every session
To ensure this event works well for anyone from anywhere in the world, we had every session repeated three times (this required a lot of monitoring on our end with a lot of help from our amazing staff). There were eight tracks running in parallel. and the sessions that attendees couldn’t watch, can be watched later. The interactive agenda helped our attendees to pick and choose the sessions they like;
The Conference Platform and Rooms
Although, this was a virtual conference, we did our best to ensure the experience is smooth and very much like an in-person event, we had rooms for lobby, lounge, auditorium, and help desk.
The lobby
This was the entry for all the conference attendees
The auditorium
Access to all sessions, Q&A and contents was through the auditorium, and there was another version of the interactive agenda there to show what is happening in each track
Session’s Delivery
The sessions mostly presented as pre-recorded to the attendees. this was to ensure the highest quality of content delivery. Attendees could use the side chat of the video to discuss matters related to the session;
Q&A with speakers
After most of the sessions, then there was a live Q&A session with the speaker(s) through Microsoft Teams. This was a free discussion style and the opportunity to ask the expert anything related to the session.
Table Talks
Table talks was free-discussion style talk on specific topics lead by speakers and experts and joined by attendees. Table talks happened live through Teams meeting.
Watch the recordings forever
Power BI Summit happened in a week, but the content is there to stay and live. You can watch the recordings forever. If you haven’t got access to it yet, try registering here.
Community Lounge
The community lounge was a room for everyone to join discussion groups and have a chat about a particular topic of Power BI. This included asking questions and getting responses.
Help Desk
The help desk was a place for all attendees to find information about how to use the virtual platform of the conference, and get in touch with the conference’s team if they have any questions.
The Exhibition Area
To have a convenient access to our sponsors for all the attendees, there was an exhibition room with the link to each sponsor’s booth.
Power ON’s booth
Actery’s booth
Inforiver’s booth
RADACAD’s booth
What our attendees said about the event
This event was well received by our attendees, here are just some of the feedback (name of people are removed for privacy). Below is just a few of thousands of nice comments we got from the attendees. We love you all and looking forward to seeing you all again next year.
John Doe
Jedi Master
“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
Most Power-BI-full event I had been to in the last few years. And a great learning resource for the next weeks or months 😉
Thank you
Kudos to you and your team. It was a fantastic summit—a lot of great sessions. After working many years in PowerBI, I learned many great things that are nuanced but interesting and have a tremendous impact.
Looking forward to 2022!!
Well done!
– Satisfied attendee
Very well organized summit, great speakers! Enjoyed every day meeting new people online and learning new PowerBI secrets 🙂 Big thanks to you and your team!
Thank you for pulling off an event of this magnitude, please continue this great work👍🏻
Well done Reza Rad and the team. The planning and logistics must have been huge. It was all seamless from a participant’s perspective. The sessions were fantastic. A really excellent event.
Awesome job! Thank you for a great summit and a big thanks to all the high-quality speakers, I learned a lot!
Thank you so much for arranging that Summit, it was memorable! I hope these keep going
Great event Reza Rad, thanks to both you and Leila Etaati
Great job, and huge thanks to Leila, you, and all the other crew involved in the greatest #PowerBI event this year
The summit has been fantastic! Thank you for hosting an event full of great #powerbi content! The live Q&A with industry experts is incredible.
Congrats Reza Rad & Leila Etaati for pulling this off. Great virtual event, best Power BI content, best community, busy exhibit hall. Great Lounges. 3000 professionals. Amazing. Very Professional.
It’s been great! Many informative sessions, glad they’re being recorded so I can catch all of them!
Congrats, a really well done conference!
the conference you have put together is AMAZING. I am really enjoying the format, and the content. You and your team deserve a great big “THANK YOU” from the entire Power BI community
Great Summit, great sessions. I hope this becomes a regular event. Thanks.
It’s been awesome so far! As always… Great work on putting all this platform together for us to access to the learning experience! Well done
The PBI Summit last week was inspirational, an eye-opener and most of all, great fun. It was such an honour to meet some of the leading lights in the Power BI Community in person – even if virtually – and to engage & connect with like-minded professionals. Congratulations to the RADACAD team for putting this event on, I am sure I’m not the only one already looking forward to next year’s Summit!
PowerBI Summit. Fully loaded action pack 5 days of Power BI sessions by such great experts. Worth attending. Thanks to all the content creators & sponsors.
Would Power BI Summit Happen again?
We first started this initiative to have a gathering of Power BI professionals while travelling is restricted due the unfortunate event of COVID-19. However, after running the event, we realized that a virtual event can be much more inclusive. There were many attendees who wouldn’t join an in-person event even if travel was not restricted (reasons being beside family, being far away from the venue of the conference in another country, and many others). Now we say the Power BI Summit is staying, and it would definitely happen again in 2022. We are working on the dates, and will announce it very soon. Stay tuned for that.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.