Avanade accelerates data transformations with Microsoft Fabric

A leading provider of digital, cloud, AI, and advisory services, Avanade works with customers around the globe to achieve greater value and advantage from their data. A unique joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade provides deep skills and experience across the Microsoft ecosystem and helps customers adopt on-premises and cloud-based solutions from Microsoft. Since 1999, the Avanade team has grown from 20 people to more than 60,000.

A 19-time Microsoft Global Systems Integrator Partner of the Year, Avanade prioritizes a customer-first approach, using their Microsoft expertise and accelerators to help companies thrive. Avanade helps organizations scale using Microsoft solutions, providing technical guidance, creative problem-solving, and customized training, migration, and modernization services. Avanade dedicates significant time and resources toward building their accelerators, helping customers to reduce risk, drive innovation, and build AI-first enterprises.

An integral thread of game-changing Microsoft Fabric

Avanade boasts one of the largest communities of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). Microsoft qualifies, assesses, and awards MVP expertise on an annual basis, and the MVP community helps Microsoft foster innovation through research and development. Avanade's MVPs in the AI, data, and analytics space collaborated with Microsoft from the early days of Fabric's inception, working as a key partner alongside Microsoft in the research, development, and testing phases. Avanade implemented Fabric as the foundation for their own data strategy, becoming one of the first customers for the platform. Following extensive implementation and optimization on their own data estate, Avanade then helped customers adopt, test, and deploy Fabric in public preview, ensuring they were ready to help customers succeed as soon as Fabric launched into general availability.

Fabric fluency leads to advanced authority

Avanade is a Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure) with the Al and Machine Learning in Microsoft Azure specialization and is also a Solutions Partner for Business Applications with a specialization in Intelligent Automation. By earning specializations, Avanade can showcase their comprehensive skills and proven success in delivering advanced solutions across Microsoft cloud, data, AI, and application modernization technologies. Additionally, specializations are critical in earning customer trust when it comes to implementing solutions with next-generation data, analytics, and AI platforms, such as Fabric.

As a Solutions Partner that has earned specializations, Avanade can be included in specific Microsoft customer funding programs. The organization can seek out customer incentive funding for those who want to adopt Fabric, and many of Avanade's customers have benefited from that funding. "With these specializations and designations, Microsoft trusts us to help deliver their solutions to our customer base and to their customers," says Grogan. "Our work with Fabric is a great illustration of that."

Fabric transforms data analysis for leading food manufacturer

An international leader in food manufacturing sought to derive new insights from their existing customer data platform. The company also wanted to streamline their complex data infrastructure, which included Systems Applications and Products (SAP), Informatica, Azure Data Lake, Databricks, and Microsoft Power BI. Avanade interoperated both Microsoft and non-Microsoft components into one solution, reducing the time and costs associated with a complete system overhaul.

Collaborating closely with their customer, Avanade established a target architecture and roadmap to address business user challenges. They also prioritized a backlog for testing and implementation during an eight-week delivery phase. Following the program's early success, the food manufacturing company aims to reengineer their SAP data flow using Fabric to create a faster, simpler, and more efficient data platform.

Insights illuminate a clear path forward

Avanade has conducted a significant amount of research on AI readiness. The company conducted a customer survey of 3,000 IT leaders in 10 countries across a variety of industries that explored the readiness of organizations to introduce and scale generative AI tools. These insights contributed to Avanade's AI Readiness Report, which revealed that most executives want to adopt generative AI in their enterprise but also understand that AI can only be as strong as the data platform that supports it. And only 36% of CEOs said they're confident about their leadership's understanding of generative AI and its governance needs.

"In our report, 92% of respondents said they require an AI-first operating model in the next 12 months," says Grogan. "They're big believers in it, but when it comes to putting their plans into action, they understand that the data foundation is the critical success factor." Harnessing an organization's data and the insights that fuel better data-driven decision-making is key to unlocking the potential value of AI, and to do this, companies need a modernized data estate. Working with Avanade to adapt and refine their data platform foundations, many customers are now in the pre-scale and scaling phase, preparing to rapidly innovate with AI.