Case Study: Penguin Random House achieves unified, near-real-time analytics across billions of records with Microsoft Power Apps

Penguin Random House enhances its outreach to book readers using Azure services and Power BI

Penguin Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers with 1.2 million titles across 200 imprints, faced fragmented legacy systems and inconsistent international ISBNs that made it slow to track sales, inventory, and reader trends. To modernize its analytics and get a unified view of customer and retail data, Penguin Random House adopted Microsoft Power Apps alongside Azure services such as Azure Analysis Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and Microsoft Power BI.

Using Microsoft Power Apps to index data and linking Azure Cognitive Search and Azure Analysis Services into Power BI dashboards, the publisher now analyzes almost 3 billion rows (55 GB) of tabular data and supports about 1,000 unique dashboard users. The Microsoft Power Apps–enabled solution eliminated manual data wrangling, delivered near‑real‑time interactive reports globally, cut reporting from days/months to minutes/weeks, and freed analysts to focus on insights and trend-driven decisions.

Penguin Random House

Josef Richberg

Senior Data Architect