Today’s blog is from guest contributors Tamer Farag, Senior Director, Fabric Partner Ecosystem Lead – Azure Data, and Simran Sachar, Director Data & AI, Digital & App Innovation.
The world is awash with data, and over the past year, we have all seen how AI has the potential to completely transform our day-to-day businesses. There is growing demand to harness the power of generative AI experiences, but doing so requires a clean data estate and can be chaotic with diverse technology stacks, fragmented teams, and silos everywhere.
Earlier this year at Microsoft Build, we introduced Microsoft Fabric in public preview - a new, unified SaaS platform that combines all the capabilities from Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. Fabric is a complete analytics platform with seven core workloads targeting specific personas and related tasks, all under a single architecture. These capabilities will empower System Integrator (SI) partners and solution builders to simplify and unify customers’ data estates in a more secure, compliant, and cost-effective manner.
The partner opportunity with Microsoft Fabric
Today, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric for purchase. Partners can read more about the latest product features and integrations in the blog announcement by Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data.
Fabric provides a comprehensive analytics platform for you to help your customers:
Govern and protect data: Fabric helps customers manage and protect their data more effectively with end-to-end, built-in governance and security capabilities. And now, we are expanding these capabilities through tighter integration with Microsoft Purview--helping our customers get end-to-end visibility and protection across their data estate. Users can now manually apply familiar Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to sensitive Fabric data, as well as browse and search their Fabric and other assets across their data estate in Microsoft Purview Data Catalog.
Seamlessly connect data sources: OneLake, Fabric's multi-cloud data lake, can help customers simplify data management and reduce data duplication with Shortcuts and Mirroring, a new data replicated capability. Mirroring allows frictionless access and management of existing cloud data warehouses and databases by giving a snapshot of the source database in the Fabric experience and keeping the replica in sync in near real-time.
Empower every business user to work with data: Microsoft Fabric can help customers foster a data culture by ensuring everyone can access insights and work with data. By integrating with the applications that people use every day like Microsoft 365, Fabric enables anyone within an organization to easily and securely use data to improve decision-making. And now, business users can work even closer with data with capabilities like Copilot for Power BI in Microsoft Fabric, Explore, and an expanded Direct Lake mode.
Prepare data for game-changing AI integration: Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now rolling out into public preview, starting with Power BI, Data Factory, Data Science, and Data Engineering workloads to help every data professional get more done, faster. Microsoft will continue to roll out AI capabilities that help users enrich, model, analyze, and explore their data.
This is a rich opportunity for partners to bring customer data into the era of AI with Fabric by building comprehensive analytics solutions, leveraging personally optimized experiences to enhance productivity, and transforming insight into action to create meaningful value for our shared customers.
Raising excitement and momentum
Our Microsoft Power BI partners are excited about the potential career growth and business opportunity with Microsoft Fabric. Watch the video below to hear firsthand how they envision it will impact their organizations:
Some partners have already started pilots and proofs of concepts with their customers and are seeing remarkable results. See what our partners have to say about Fabric:
Read more details about some of these partners and their customer pilots here.
Build the skills you need to meet customer demand
Many partners have already started preparing their organizations for the new business opportunities that Microsoft Fabric will bring. Our global partners Accenture and Capgemini trained a combined total of 4,200 individuals within their organizations on Fabric during preview and are ready to meet customer demand.
“At Accenture and Avanade, we are ready to securely unify data, analytics, and AI for our clients with Microsoft Fabric. We have launched the Microsoft Fabric University that already has trained 3,000 data professionals to be fluent in Fabric, and we are taking lessons learned from building our own operations on Fabric to accelerate AI opportunities with our clients across the globe.” – Simon Thomas, Data & AI Global Lead for Avanade.
“Through our strategic partnership and the transformative capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, we are accelerating data value creation for our customers. Capgemini's investment in scaling Fabric competency is paving the way for excellence through our Fabric-specific assessment and certification via Capgemini's OCEANS Tool, provides enterprises with the opportunity to unleash unified data and drive their organizations forward.” – Niraj Parihar, Insights & Data CEO of Capgemini.
You can do the same and prepare your organizations to learn the latest Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and analytics product updates and understand how to build and grow practices by joining the new global Fabric Partner Community—a diverse and inclusive partner community through Microsoft Teams open to all Microsoft partners. In this Teams channel, stay connected and engage with the engineering Fabric Partner Team, product teams, and your partner peers. Attend the weekly Fabric Engineering Connection meetings to learn of the latest product updates and roadmap, along with the newest business resources and offerings. Complete the participation form to join.
Take your learning even further by joining our upcoming Fabric Workshop on December 4-7, 2023 (IST) to hear presentations live and engage in hands-on labs. If not located in the APAC region, watch on-demand recordings and review resources from the previous Fabric Bootcamp and Workshop where you can learn from sales and technical training, available at aka.ms/AzureDepthWorkshops.
We're announcing an enhanced portfolio of Microsoft Credentials, including the new “Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate" certification along with several new Microsoft Applied Skills covering scenarios using Microsoft Fabric, like implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, and real-time analytics solutions. These credentials are coming in the next months.
Ready to dive into Fabric and start preparing for these credentials? Take the “Microsoft Fabric Challenge” as part of the Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge, Ignite edition. Skill up for in-demand technical scenarios and enter to win a VIP event pass for the next Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft Build. Terms and conditions apply. See official rules for more details. The challenge is available now through January 15, 2024, so get started now to avoid missing a beat.
Leverage Microsoft resources and offerings to generate leads and accelerate opportunities
Join us on this journey of customer transformation with these actions you can take today:
- Download Fabric resources, including customer pitch decks, licensing deck, deployable Fabric DREAM demos, product icons, and more to start customer conversations and demo Fabric—available at aka.ms/FabricPartnerResources.
- Following the success of Dashboard in a Day (DIAD), we will be launching Fabric Analyst in a Day (FAIAD), a new partner-led workshop under the XIAD (X-in-a-Day) motion. This workshop will train customers on Microsoft Fabric, targeting Power BI data analysts. We will have Train the Trainer (TTT) session recordings available in early December to learn the best practices and tips for delivering the workshop ahead of FAIAD event launch. For more information on the FAIAD partner requirements and how to get started, visit aka.ms/XIADPartnerOpportunity. In the coming months, we will be sharing more details on new opportunities for Fabric customer lead generation.
- Accelerate deals with Azure Innovate to get started on Fabric. The comprehensive Azure Innovate Partner-led offers help both SI and ISV partners to increase deal velocity with rich investments for every stage of the customer journey. Funding ranges from pre-to-post sales, all accessible right within Partner Center. Engagements are nominated and led by partners end-to-end. With this new Partner-led offer, time to value is reduced with seamless, automated approvals and standardized engagement sizes. Visit the Azure Innovate partner landing page to get started and nominate today!