Today’s blog is from guest contributor Kuleen Bharadwaj, Senior Director, Community, Learning, and Partner Programs – Azure Data, and Simran Sachar, Director Data & AI, Digital & App Innovation.
Introducing Microsoft Fabric
Organizations are eager to harness their data to gain a competitive edge. However, their analytics systems often comprise several disconnected services that use proprietary data formats. This makes integration complex, time-consuming and costly, and the resulting systems are often fragile.
Systems integrators and solution builders have been trying to help customers simplify and unify their data estates in a secure, compliant and cost-effective manner so that they can use large language models against their own data. But, this has proven difficult because the analytics market is fragmented with thousands of point technologies, and no single vendor offers an end-to-end integrated platform.
Today we announced Microsoft Fabric — a unified SaaS experience that provides all the capabilities needed for analytics across Microsoft Azure Data Factory, Power BI, and the next generation of Synapse. Fabric provides data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability (the Data Activator experience), and business intelligence under a single architecture.
The Partner Business Opportunity
Microsoft Fabric provides a comprehensive analytics platform for you to help your customers:
1. Significantly reduce costs, improve collaboration, and simplify purchasing
Fabric provides deeply integrated, consistent, role-specific experiences for data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users. It makes collaboration easier, as data artifacts for all roles are stored in a single shared workspace. A single compute pool shared across all analytics workloads also simplifies purchasing and resource management, and further reduces cost.
2. Avoid data silos, data duplication, and vendor lock-in
Fabric offers a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake, which is built on ADLS Gen 2 and automatically available via existing APIs on a dedicated tenant to every customer. Data from ADLS Gen 2, AWS S3, and Google Storage (coming soon) can be directly linked via a virtualization capability called “Shortcuts.” A single copy of the data and a shared open data format (Delta/Parquet) in OneLake powers all workloads, and a universal security model to set policy across all engines will ship soon.
3. Empower their business users and create a data culture
Fabric integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps. Users can easily access and analyze OneLake data from Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint. Fabric also connects with Microsoft Graph Data Connect to provide insights on customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and people productivity.
4. Accelerate time-to-market by harnessing AI
Copilot experiences powered by Azure OpenAI Service are built into every layer of Fabric to provide generative AI solutions for customers against their own data. Copilot in Fabric is coming soon and will enable all analytics personas, from the data engineer to the business user, to use conversational AI to speed up tasks. Copilot will also adhere to the organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies; Microsoft’s Azure Open AI base models will not be improved using customer tenant data.
Partner Feedback
Several partners have tried Fabric in an early private preview and are excited by the business opportunity it presents. Watch what our partners at Avanade, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, PwC, SAS, and Sonata Software have to say about Fabric:
Get Started
Microsoft Fabric is in public preview and free trials are available to everyone — no credit card required. Fabric will also be fully available for all existing Power BI Premium customers as opt-in via the Power BI Admin portal, and ready for purchase through Azure starting June 1, 2023.