PwC helps drive major growth with Microsoft Fabric

November 19, 2024

As a multinational professional services network, PwC helps businesses transform with the power of data, AI, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Recognized by Microsoft for their end-to-end capabilities, holistic business advisory services, and proven ability to innovate, PwC is a 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award winner with 22 awards. PwC's commitment to innovation by using leading technology is evident in their own AI transformation journey as "client zero," constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation. By leveraging human insight, advanced technologies, and robust data protection measures, PwC helps empower clients to streamline processes, accelerate time-to-market for new initiatives, and confidently move forward with digital transformation.

PwC's longstanding relationship with Microsoft has flourished into a thriving Microsoft Azure practice with offerings in data analytics and AI. PwC's Azure specializations—which include the Data Warehouse Migration to Microsoft Azure specialization, Analytics on Microsoft Azure specialization, and AI and Machine Learning in Microsoft Azure specialization—establish them as trusted professionals in these fields. "We not only formalized our deep understanding of Microsoft services when we earned these specializations—we also built trust with our customers," says Anil Nagaraj, PwC Principal Analytic Insights Practice.

PwC invested heavily in their Microsoft joint business relationship and industry-leading knowledge—and it has paid off. Their onshore analytics team grew from 80 people to 800 in just three years. PwC's growth as a leader in the industry paired with the credibility that comes from their collaboration with Microsoft has created their strong presence in the marketplace. Today, Microsoft Fabric plays a key role in how PwC develops data modernization solutions for customers.

The Fabric takeover: PwC gets to market faster with Fabric

Recognizing PwC's leadership and experience, Microsoft invited them to participate in the private preview of Fabric. As an early adopter, PwC had the opportunity to provide feedback on Fabric, and they claim that this close relationship has made them one of the strongest Microsoft partners bringing Fabric to market. Through their benchmarking, PwC immediately noted the enhanced capabilities of Fabric compared to other analytics solutions on the market. For instance, Fabric helps reduce the complexity of data modernization and provides a complete analytics platform with a unifying view. Businesses who turn to Fabric can reduce implementation time and effort, unify disparate data to provide reliable, holistic, and accessible analytics, and seamlessly integrate multi-cloud data sources.

Fabric helps bring developers and business users together

One such customer that has benefited from Fabric is a leading European real estate and facility management company. This organization offers development and fit-out services, runs and maintains technical facilities, and provides ongoing support for clients. They encountered obstacles to unify systems, standards, and structures. They also wanted to leverage data-driven strategies to address climate transition and promote sustainability.

After consulting with PwC, the organization chose Fabric because they were impressed with its rapid use case implementation and its user-friendly interface that helps make creating analytics use cases more seamless. "The real 'wow' factor for them was that it only took four months to onboard developers and business users to Fabric—something that traditionally would have taken up to 18 months. They even had some analytics use cases and data pipelines in production within that timeframe," explains Whyte.

Prior to Fabric, they faced a backlog of data requests that exceeded their developer team's capacity, data requests occasionally taking up to two years. Now, because the developers and business users are working on the same platform, data requests can be directly addressed more efficiently. By shifting away from an IT-driven approach and adopting Fabric, the organization empowered business users and developers to collaborate more closely. They're now able to go from data insights to implementation much faster and more smoothly. The organization has since combined 25 data sources across six business domains and implemented four analytics use cases and two AI use cases with Fabric.