Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive analytics solution designed to empower organizations to harness the full potential of their data. It’s designed to streamline the process of data management, helping companies understand, reason over, learn from, and act on their data seamlessly and efficiently while making data more accessible to various roles across the business.

To better understand the financial impact that Fabric is having on companies today, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study which examines the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Fabric. The purpose of the 2024 study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Fabric on their organizations. Below is a summary of what we’ve learned.

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In today’s data-driven business landscape, executives are constantly seeking solutions that not only streamline operations but also deliver substantial financial returns. The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study of Microsoft Fabric provides a deep analysis of the benefits and costs associated with deploying Fabric.

Based on interviews with companies currently using Fabric, Forrester constructed a composite company and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the interviewees, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis. The composite organization has the following characteristics:

• The global organization has $5 billion in annual revenue and 10,000 employees.
• This includes 40 data engineers and 400 business analysts.
• Prior to deploying Fabric, the composite organization leveraged multiple tools and systems to store, access, and analyze data, including Azure Synapse solutions and Microsoft Power BI.
• In the first year, Fabric is rolled out to 50% of the business, increasing to 85% in the second year and 100% in the third year.

See the study for additional assumptions specific to each impacted area of the business.

Key findings

The TEI report reveals a considerable ROI of 379% for the composite organization that deployed Fabric. This figure is a testament to the significant cost savings and business benefits enabled by the solution. The net present value (NPV) of $9.79 million underscores the substantial financial gains that can be realized over time, making a strong case for the investment in Fabric from a fiscal standpoint.

Productivity gains and efficiency

One of the standout benefits highlighted in the study is an increase in data engineering productivity of 25%. This gain stems from a 90% reduction in the time data engineers spend searching, integrating, and debugging, and translates to savings of $1.8 million for the composite organization. Furthermore, business analyst access and output are improved by 20%, leading to an additional $4.8 million in savings. These productivity enhancements not only represent direct financial benefits but also indicate a more efficient and effective approach to data management and analysis.

Enhanced business outcomes

The ability to leverage better insights from high-quality data leads to enhanced business results, with increases profits to the tune of $3.6 million. This point is particularly relevant for C-suite executives, as it emphasizes the impact of data-driven decision-making on the bottom line. The study’s findings suggest that with Fabric, businesses can provide faster and better answers to key questions, resulting in better-informed strategic decisions and improved financial performance.

Employee satisfaction and retention

The TEI study also touches on the human aspect of technology deployment, noting an 8% reduction in attrition. This suggests that Fabric not only contributes to the financial health of an organization but also to employee satisfaction and retention. For executives, the implications are clear: investing in Fabric can help attract and retain top talent, which is crucial for long-term success.

Cost savings on infrastructure

By eliminating outdated infrastructure and consolidating technologies, organizations can save up to $779,000 over three years. This direct cost savings is highly relevant for those who are tasked with optimizing expenses. The report indicates that Fabric allows for a more streamlined tech stack, reducing the need for multiple servers, virtual machines, and analysis services.

Unquantified benefits and flexibility

In addition to the quantified benefits above, the study mentions several less measurable advantages, such as enhanced analytics creativity, improved alignment between technical and business teams, and heightened attention to correct data governance. These benefits, while not easily assessed in financial terms, contribute to the overall value proposition of Fabric.

The flexibility offered by Fabric is another aspect that business leaders might find appealing. The solution’s ability to adapt to various business scenarios and its potential to incorporate underutilized data for better decision-making are significant considerations for any executive evaluating technology investments.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Fabric integrates several core workloads, including data engineering, data warehousing, data science, and real-time intelligence—all under one roof. This consolidation facilitates a seamless flow of data across different stages, from collection to analysis, enabling businesses to derive actionable insights swiftly.

The platform’s strength lies in its ability to unify disparate data sources, providing a cohesive view of information that can drive strategic decisions. With Fabric, companies can break down data silos, enabling a more collaborative and informed approach to business intelligence. Fabric’s real-time intelligence capability is particularly beneficial for industries that generate vast amounts of data continuously. It allows for immediate processing and analysis, ensuring that businesses can respond to market changes with agility.

In terms of user experience, Fabric offers a software as a service (SaaS) model that simplifies onboarding and provides a cost-effective solution for companies at any scale. Its user-friendly interface democratizes data analytics, making it accessible to non-experts and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making.

By leveraging Microsoft Fabric, companies can not only achieve more with their data but also enjoy increased productivity, enhanced collaboration, and significant cost savings. It’s a strategic investment that aligns with the goals of modern, forward-thinking businesses aiming to capitalize on their data assets.

Explore the benefits of Fabric

The TEI study of Microsoft Fabric presents a strong case for its deployment, with compelling ROI numbers and a multitude of benefits that extend beyond financial returns. For executives, the study underscores the strategic value of Fabric in driving productivity, efficiency, and enhanced business outcomes. As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of the digital economy, solutions like Fabric that offer a comprehensive approach to data analytics management will be pivotal in gaining and maintaining a competitive edge.

Get started today

• Read the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study.
• Watch our Fabric webinar “Getting Started with Microsoft Fabric in 60 Minutes.”
• Learn more about Microsoft Fabric.
• Try Microsoft Fabric for free.
• Join us for the European Fabric Community Conference.

The post Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study: Microsoft Fabric delivers 379% ROI over three years appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

After January 1, 2025, existing Power BI Premium per capacity customers should work with their Microsoft account representative to transition to a suitable Fabric SKU and pricing plan at the time of their next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC).

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Retiring Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs 

Last year, we introduced Microsoft Fabric—combining the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform. Microsoft Fabric is a superset of Power BI Premium; meaning it has all the capabilities of Power BI Premium plus six other core workloads. To make the transition as easy as possible, we have ensured customers can access Fabric capabilities on their existing Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs). 

However, with both pay-as-you-go and reservation SKUs now available for Microsoft Fabric, we are announcing the eventual end of life for the Power BI Premium P-SKUs. Depending on your existing agreement, the retirement will impact you differently:  

• New customers will not be able to purchase Power BI Premium P-SKUs after July 1, 2024.
• Existing customers without an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will be able to renew their Power BI Premium capacity until January 1, 2025. Customers who have a renewal date after January 1, 2025 will need to replace their P-SKU purchase with the purchase of an Fabric per capacity SKUs (F-SKUs) at the end of their agreement.
• Customers with an existing EA agreement can continue to renew their P-SKU purchase annually until the end of their EA agreement. If the end of the existing EA agreement is after January 1st, 2025, they will have to transition to an F-SKU once the agreement has ended to continue using Microsoft Fabric.
• Customers on a sovereign cloud will not be impacted by this retirement as they do not currently have access to Microsoft Fabric. We will provide additional information as soon as it’s available.  

All existing customers will be able to purchase more Power BI Premium capacity on their current agreement until its end date.

The benefits of the Microsoft Fabric SKU 

Customers that migrate their P-SKU purchase to F-SKU will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric SKUs are eligible for MACC which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. There is also a pay-as-you-go option for Fabric which enables you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. F-SKU customers can also take advantage of smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry level P-SKU. See all Microsoft Fabric SKUs available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.   

Migrating to a Microsoft Fabric SKU 

Migrating your Power BI artifacts is as easy as reassigning your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. Administrators can even bulk assign workspaces to accelerate the process. You will be able to access your Power BI and Fabric artifacts for at least 90 days after P-SKU capacity subscription has ended. During these 90 days, you will be able to migrate workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without fear of losing access to your existing work. Learn more about managing and reassigning your workspaces in the Microsoft Fabric documentation.  

Power BI Embedded and Power BI Report Server 

Microsoft Fabric SKUs are not compatible with Power BI Report Server. To continue accessing Power BI Report Server, you can instead acquire it through SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance. This option is the most popular way of acquiring Power BI Report Server. See Microsoft Volume Licensing or talk with your Microsoft account representative for more details. 

Microsoft Fabric SKUs are compatible with Power BI Embedded and can be used to run all of your Power BI Embedded activities. Read the blog “Power BI Embedded with Microsoft Fabric” for more information. 

Next steps 

To learn more about this change and how to migrate your P-SKU purchases to F-SKU, view the Power BI Premium documentation. You can also view your Fabric capacity pricing options on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.  

The post Important update coming to Power BI Premium licensing appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Long-time partners Microsoft and Cognite have successfully delivered digital transformation value to industrial customers in energy, industrial carbon management, manufacturing, and renewables globally. In a landmark new collaboration, Cognite and Microsoft are excited to announce an expansion of their strategic partnership to bring enterprise data operations to the generative AI era, from the shop floor all the way to the top floor. For the first time, enterprise and industrial—information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and engineering technology (ET)—converge for data operations and AI value.

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Cognite, world leader in industrial DataOps software, is collaborating with Microsoft to integrate its flagship product Cognite Data Fusion with Microsoft’s data platform Fabric, to deliver a unified enterprise DataOps solution that spans the full enterprise, with vertical industry capabilities for industrial (such as engineering technology (ET) and OT) data workloads enabled through industrial copilots. Data will be available through both Cognite Data Fusion and Microsoft Fabric for customers to leverage Cognite Data Fusion for driving decisions in asset centric scenarios, for example Asset Performance Optimization, and Fabric to generate insights to run their business.

By combining Cognite’s industry-specific capabilities with Microsoft’s enterprise-scale, AI-focused data platform, this partnership is delivering a state-of-the-art platform that significantly accelerates time to value and scalability for industrial use cases, while addressing the complexities of industrial and enterprise data fragmentation, technology, security, and compliance in the age of AI. By leveraging the strengths of the two companies, we are set to advance the digital transformation of industries worldwide.

“Our collaboration with Microsoft is more than a convergence of platforms; it’s about aligning our vision of empowering industries to drive productivity through digital transformation. Cognite’s robust industrial data operations and contextualization capabilities, combined with the scale and intelligence of Azure, will unlock new frontiers in industrial AI. Our customers have asked us for IT, OT, and ET convergence on DataOps—we are pleased to now offer that together with Microsoft Fabric.”Moe Tanabian, Chief Product Officer of Cognite

“At Microsoft, we are pleased to work with industry leaders like Cognite to extend our platforms into specific domains and business processes that are critical to industries like Energy with complex industrial requirements. We are pleased to see Cognite integrate their industrial data operations platform, Cognite Data Fusion, with Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365, and the Microsoft OpenAI Service to unlock value in industry verticals such as Industrial Carbon Management.”Matthew Kerner, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Cloud for Industry

Cognite understands industry requirements and is a strategic partner for industrial data operations

The world’s asset intensive industries are going through an unparalleled period of change, moving towards a digital industrial future enabling energy transition and more efficient and sustainable industries.

Cognite has carved out a segment in the industrial sector worldwide as a purveyor of digital transformation, particularly within energy and manufacturing. Its core product, Cognite Data Fusion, is a result of its deep industry insight, offering a platform that not only organizes complex data from a wide variety of industrial (such as OT and ET) sources, but also turns it into actionable intelligence.

The importance of Cognite Data Fusion in industrial data management can be attributed to a number of unique capabilities:

• Sub second performance for real time decision making.
• Out-of-the-box connectivity with close to 100 different industrial systems and software.
• Processing of industrial (OT) data types, engineering diagrams and piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), 3D (for example computer-aided design (CAD), point clouds, and photogrammetry), and large-scale and high frequency timeseries data.
• Data contextualization with particular focus on industrial data.
• Flexible support for industrial data modeling, including industry standard data models (for example, CHIFOS, ISO15904, and more.)
• High performance industrial knowledge graph as a way to unify industrial data in well defined data models for ease of access and real-time data consumption.
• Built-in tooling to support industry-specific needs, including support for data science, AI, and computer vision.
• Software development kits (SDKs) and connectors accelerating the development of industrial applications; both low code and no code and traditional software development.

Furthermore, a unique value proposition of Cognite lies in its user-centric approach for industrial domain experts. Cognite Data Fusion stands out for its intuitive interface, allowing users across an organization to leverage industrial data without the need for deep technical expertise. This is even further enhanced by infusing the latest AI services from Microsoft into interfaces and in new offerings like the industrial Cognite Data Fusion copilots that were developed by Cognite in partnership with Microsoft leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, building applications that utilize this contextualized data and provide decision making is even simpler and faster. This democratization of industrial data is pivotal, enabling swift, informed decision-making across all levels of a business.

Microsoft Fabric drives AI-powered industrial decision making

Fabric is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform which can meet the demands of modern industrial applications in the age of AI. It is a part of the Microsoft Cloud services, which provides robust support for a variety of use cases—from data storage and management to advanced analytics and machine learning.

The importance of Fabric in decision making applications that combines enterprise, operational, and engineering data can be attributed to several key features:

• Complete analytics platform: Fabric can reshape how your teams work with data by bringing everyone together on a single, AI-powered platform built for the era of AI. Fabric combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform with seven core workloads—each purpose-built for specific personas and specific tasks. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, Fabric can reduce the typical cost and effort of integration and simplify governance and billing.
• Open and lake-centric: Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication.
• AI-powered: With Copilot in Fabric, you can use natural language to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models.
• Built for a data culture: Fabric was built to help foster a data culture—enabling anyone to quickly go from data sitting in a lake to stunning Power BI visuals embedded in a Microsoft 365 app. Fabric seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft 365 applications people use every day like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and more to improve decision-making and drive impact.
• Support for operational and enterprise data: For many enterprise applications, the ability to incorporate process time series and event data in combination with other data sources is critical for operational efficiency and timely decision-making. Fabric’s streaming data storage and processing services accelerate the development of applications that can utilize the industrial operations data from platforms like Cognite Data Fusion for enterprise decision making.
• Unified data governance: Integrated with Microsoft Purview, Fabric provides tools for unified data governance, making it easier for organizations to manage, monitor, and secure data across various applications and platforms. This is crucial for maintaining data integrity and quality in complex industrial settings.
• Diverse ecosystem of partners: Microsoft has an industry leading ecosystem of partners that provides industrial applications on the Azure platform. Combining these data sources with the operational data from Cognite Data Fusion opens opportunities to optimize the end-to-end decision making for industrial workflows. The workflows span from “subsurface” data from Azure Data Manager for Energy (using OSDU compliant data and APIs) to the industrial operations data from data sources in Industrial Carbon Management, Hydrocarbon Production Operations, and beyond.

Microsoft and Cognite: A strategic partnership journey

Elevating the successful multi-year partnership between Microsoft and Cognite, the expanded partnership is structured around a visionary three-horizon approach, ensuring a progressive and strategic collaboration.

The partnership between Microsoft and Cognite is set to converge enterprise and industrial data operations, creating a scalable, AI-driven platform that meets the demands of modern industries. As Moe Tanabian of Cognite puts it, “Together with Microsoft, we are not just engineering a platform but pioneering an ecosystem that propels industrial data operations into a new era.” Matthew Kerner of Microsoft echoes this sentiment, “This is the beginning of a journey that will transform the industrial landscape, leveraging the combined strengths of Cognite Data Fusion and Microsoft Fabric to empower our customers.”

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and lead the way in converged enterprise and industrial data operations, significantly accelerating time to value and scalability for both enterprise and industrial use cases, unlocking new possibilities and driving business and operational productivity through digital transformation.

Learn more

• Our teams, including our product engineers, will be at the CERAWeek 2024 from March 18 to 22, 2024 in Microsoft Agora House. Reach out to us during the event to see demos and discuss how we can deliver your needs with our integrated solution.  
• Learn more about AI Copilot for Industry with Cognite Data Fusion.
• Get started with Azure Data Manager for Energy today.
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Fabric.

The post Microsoft and Cognite extend partnership to build industrial data operations platform on Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

The importance of data in AI-driven retail fuels the algorithms, insights, and personalized experiences that are increasingly integral to success of the modern retailer. The ability to collect, harmonize, and derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of data empowers retailers to make informed decisions, create personalized experiences, and stay competitive. Understanding that data is key to success, we’ve also released retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric—helping retailers to standardize and enrich raw data with connectors to engage customers more effectively. Read on to learn how you and your employees can maximize benefits from your data.

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Optimize shopper experiences with personalization  

Generative AI models have vastly improved the experience of chatting with virtual assistants—providing expert advice and bringing ease and convenience to online shoppers. The copilot template for personalized shopping on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) enables retailers to build tailored shopping experiences that allow consumers to shop using natural language. Online shopping is now akin to consulting with a specialist in a store. Personalized shopping taps into the retailer’s vast expertise and knowledge base to apply across shopping situations with the convenience of anytime, anywhere availability. Using a retailer’s current systems and data, this copilot template can be embedded into existing experiences, such as a website or app, making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase the products they want. With the prebuilt copilot template, retailers can offer customers personalized expert advice as well as guide the shopper to find unexpected items and learn more about the retailer. For example, a shopper going camping for the first time asking for clothing recommendations will get suggestions for clothing as well as complementary gear with personalized advice based on the customer’s history and preferences, such as color, style, and design and cross referenced with publicly available information such as destination, weather, and time of year as it relates to the customer’s trip.

The copilot template is designed to be easy for any retailer to use. Its open architecture lets each organization leverage existing investments in commerce, inventory, and personalization solutions to support a wide range of buying environments, including e-commerce sites and mobile apps. Designed to have interactive discussions with shoppers, the copilot template can be adapted to each seller’s brand and values, responds to shopper questions, and facilitates decision-making to create a personalized experience that feels natural and easygoing. 

Increase productivity and efficiency with copilot template for store operations   

Whether associates are long-term employees or seasonal workers, empowering the workforce and optimizing their performance is critical to customer satisfaction and retailer success. With the new generative AI-powered copilot template for store operations on Azure OpenAI Service (preview), retailers can build technology that allows frontline workers to quickly and easily access the information needed for their work day, increasing productivity and efficiency with text and voice commands.  

Retail frontline workers can easily get answers to questions on store operating procedures like how to handle refunds or set up product displays. Using natural language, associates can ask questions about the product catalog to support shoppers, review HR policies and benefits, or complete surveys. Copilot template for store operations enables workers to independently manage issues such as addressing damaged items. For example, with a few prompts, an associate can ask copilot template for store operations for the company’s standard operating procedure for replacing damaged products. In addition to getting the right steps to handle the process, the associate can also create a task to replace products and send an alert through Microsoft Teams to the store manager. Copilot template for store operations eliminates the need for pen and paper, data in multiple systems, or the retail frontline tracking down the store manager for every problem that arises.  

Likewise, the copilot template for store operations helps store managers optimize the work experience for their associates and deliver improved customer experiences. They can ask Microsoft Teams for a summary of key performance indicators (KPIs)—such as sales, inventory, and customer feedback. Using copilot template for store operations, a manager can quickly create tasks and assign associates to address. Copilot template for store operations provides retailers insights and information in the normal flow of work, helping managers and associates increase productivity and responsiveness. Finally, the copilot template, when used in combination with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse capabilities empowers customers to seamlessly connect data across multiple line-of-business systems to generate AI-driven recommendations and actionable solutions that will help store associates make the right decisions.

Gain actionable insights fast with retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a complete analytics platform built for the era of AI. It enables the transformation of data into predictive insights, to ensure better business outcomes and reduce costly data replication and movement to support data analysts and data scientists. With these solutions in place, organizations can also automate duplicative tasks resulting in data efficiency and resource management.   The self-serve ability enables organizations to equip everyone in the company with their own access to these powerful analytics. Underscoring all of this is a commitment to help keep data secure and protected in a single source while meeting stringent compliance requirements.  

Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric are a set of industry-specific capabilities that enable customers to accelerate time to insight generation by unifying, enriching, and modelling industry data in Microsoft Fabric​. Organizations can plan, architect, and design data solutions for data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Using data definition, formats, and storage enhancement, a standardized data model is created to help organizations derive actionable insights from large volumes of retailer data. Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric provide seamless integration across different systems and applications. By establishing a foundation for naming, data classification, and access controls, retailers can be assured effective governance of their data. 

Sitecore OrderCloud connector enhances your digital capabilities 

Sitecore OrderCloud connector, one of the key capabilities of retail data solutions, gives you a quick and reliable platform to get commerce data onto Microsoft retail industry standard schema. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to align with the data model. The connector works across three key data sets:   

1. Products: All the sellable products available in Sitecore OrderCloud. 
2. Customers: End customers who are shopping from your e-commerce portals. 
3. Orders: Customer generated online sales orders.  

The key role of the connector is to get data into the retail data solutions schema, giving users the benefit of access to solutions that are built on top of retail data solutions. Microsoft Power BI reports on sales, products, and customer data solutions can be enabled on top of Sitecore OrderCloud data out of box. 

The connector ensures that no personal customer information is transferred when using Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform capabilities such as Power BI reports and other related solutions. The Power BI reports provide actionable insights on top of data. Each report provides a specific view of data across sales, customers, and products that can help make impactful merchandising, marketing, and supply chain decisions.  

“Sitecore OrderCloud delivers limitless commerce capabilities and opportunities to consolidate commerce channels into a single managed marketplace. The out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Fabric unlocks the ability to be a forward-looking AI retail organization. Retail organizations can benefit from stateful services, reliable messaging, orchestration, monitoring, and security, while continuing to focus on their roadmap and strategic business objectives.” Steven Davis, Vice President of Engineering Commerce, Sitecore 

Make strategic product decisions with frequently bought together

Lastly, with this release, retailers can make informed decisions about product placement and promotions when using the frequently bought together application template for Smart store analytics. This template provides insights and recommendations and applies data science to unearth deeper insights into store performance. Retailers can forecast foot traffic, group products that are frequently bought together and understand products substitutions to optimize store operations and increase customer satisfaction.

Frequently bought together analytics enables retailers to: 

• Find the top revenue products and boost cross-sales by putting identified products closer. 
• Check the lowest revenue products and decide which ones to drop from the product catalogue. 
• Measure how past marketing actions, like new shelf layout or promotion performance, affected the sales of each item in a product group by comparing before and after sales revenues when purchased together. 

Learn more

• Join us at NRF 2024 from January 13 to 16, 2024 in New York City, New York to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail’s cutting-edge AI technologies and how they can optimize your business.
• Join Shelley Bransten at the Microsoft Retail Digital Forum on February 6, 2024 for the How AI Unlocks Value for Retail session to learn about the research and gain insights into what is driving AI transformation among leading retailers.
• To get started, you can sign up here or learn more about our latest capabilities on the Microsoft Cloud for Retail homepage. 

The post Microsoft Cloud for Retail unlocks a new level of productivity with AI appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Creating custom AI experiences requires data—lots of it. Data is the foundation on which AI is built and the simple fact is AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. As you enter a future built on AI, you need a data estate capable of fueling AI innovation across your organization. This can be a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions.

That’s why we introduced Microsoft Fabric earlier this year. As Satya Nadella, CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, said at Microsoft Build 2023, Fabric is “perhaps the biggest launch of a data product from Microsoft since the launch of SQL Server.”

Microsoft Fabric has caught the imagination of our customers, partners, and community members. Since the preview announcement, 25,000 organizations around the world are already using Fabric today, including 67 percent of the Fortune 500. Most customers appreciate Fabric’s end-to-end value proposition, with 84 percent of companies using three or more workloads. Check out some of the early Fabric success stories with our customers:

Milliman 

“Microsoft Fabric would have been our choice from the beginning—had it only existed then. Building a democratized data platform was too big of a distraction from our focus on supporting actuaries in managing risk,”—Tom Peplow, Principal and Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Life Technology Solutions, Milliman. 

Watch Milliman’s transformation with Fabric. 

Zeiss 

“Previewing Fabric was a great opportunity to explore features right at the beginning and to think about how we could adopt them in our organization. We soon realized it was the natural evolution for us in our data mesh journey as it provided a complete analytics service in a single offering.”—Markus Morgner, Head of Enterprise Data Platform and Engineering, ZEISS Group.

Watch Zeiss’s transformation with Fabric.

Ernst and Young 

“In developing and launching EY Intelligence, Microsoft Fabric has been a game changer. Our unique analytics as a service offering gives the C-suite at our client organizations cross functional transparency and on demand insights to make better and quicker decisions,”—Swen Gehring, Director, Strategy and Transactions, Ernst and Young.

Watch Ernst and Young’s transformation with Fabric. 

Announcing the general availability of Microsoft Fabric

We are thrilled to announce Microsoft Fabric is now generally available for purchase. Microsoft Fabric can reshape how your teams work with data by bringing everyone together on a single, AI-powered platform built for the era of AI.

Watch a quick overview: 

See why we believe Microsoft Fabric will redefine the current analytics landscape:

Fabric is a complete analytics platform

Fabric combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform with seven core workloads—each purpose-built for specific personas and specific tasks. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, Fabric can reduce the typical cost and effort of integrating analytics services and help simplify your data estate. Fabric’s unified architecture simplifies billing by providing a single pool of capacity and storage that is used for every workload. It also helps you manage and protect your data more effectively with end-to-end governance and security capabilities that work across your data in Microsoft Fabric and beyond. 

Fabric is lake-centric and open

Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication. OneLake shortcuts allow you to virtualize data into OneLake from across clouds, accounts, and domains, with sources like Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Amazon S3—all without duplication, movement, or changes to metadata or ownership. Once enabled in OneLake, you can use domains and workspaces to organize your data into a logical data mesh and empower everyone to search across this mesh using an intuitive, personalized data hub. OneLake’s open data format means you only need to load the data into the lake once and you can use the single copy across every Fabric workload and engine, minimizing data duplication and sprawl. 

Fabric empowers every business user

Microsoft Fabric was built to help foster a data culture—enabling anyone to quickly go from data sitting in a lake to stunning Power BI visuals embedded in a Microsoft 365 app. You can more easily empower your business with capabilities like Real-Time Analytics, which can empower your teams with real-time insights with incredibly low latency. In addition, Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows users to create a real-time connection from your Power BI reports to your data in OneLake. This direct integration between Power BI and OneLake helps ensure only one copy of the data is ever created, helping you promote reuse of the best data for business users and avoid data fragmentation. This data can then easily and securely flow to the Microsoft 365 applications people use every day like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and more to improve decision-making and drive impact. 

Fabric is AI-powered

We are infusing AI into every layer in Microsoft Fabric to help every data professional get more done, faster. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, you can use natural language to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Copilot in Fabric, starting with the Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, and Data Science experiences. In Power BI, you can create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. In Data Factory, you can simply describe how you want to ingest and transform the data using natural language and Copilot does the rest. When working in a notebook in Data Engineering or Data Science, you can more quickly enrich, model, analyze, and explore their data. 

The preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric will be rolling out in stages, with the goal that customers with Fabric capacity (F64 or higher) or Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) have access to the Copilot preview by the end of March 2024. You don’t need to sign up to join the preview, it will automatically become available to you as a new setting in the Fabric Admin Portal when it has rolled-out to your tenant. When charging begins for the Copilot in Fabric experiences, you can simply count Copilot usage against your existing Fabric or Power BI Premium capacity. Check out the Copilot in Fabric docs for complete instructions and requirements and don’t hesitate to contact your Microsoft representative, partner, or leave a comment in the Fabric Community site if you have any questions. 

Let’s take a look at the latest features and integrations we are announcing in each of these areas. 

Microsoft Fabric

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Complete analytics platform: Govern and protect your Fabric data

Over the past few years, organizations have seen a massive increase in their digital footprint, leading to data fragmentation, growth, and blind spots across their data estate. When we announced the preview of Microsoft Fabric, we shared an array of administration, governance, and security capabilities in Fabric to help provide visibility across your tenant, insights into usage and adoption, and tools to secure and govern your data end-to-end.

We are now announcing an expansion of these governance and security capabilities through tighter integration with Microsoft Purview. In Fabric, you can now manually apply Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to classify sensitive Fabric data—a familiar concept to the millions of Microsoft 365 users who employ these labels every day. We’ve also simplified audits by automatically capturing user and system operations in Microsoft Purview audit logs. Both sensitivity labels, and the audit integration are now generally available.

In addition to integrating Purview data security and compliance capabilities throughout Fabric, we are also infusing Fabric artifacts into the Microsoft Purview Data Map. The Data Map is automatically provisioned and attached to every Fabric instance by default; no set-up required. You can browse and search your Fabric and other assets across your data estate in the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog. For easy access to all these Purview capabilities, we’ve created a centralized page called the Purview Hub, currently in public preview, which serves as a gateway to Purview and contains insights into item inventory, sensitive data, and endorsement. Read the Fabric GA announcement blog to read about these features in more detail.

Lake-centric and open: Seamlessly connect your data sources to Fabric

The modern data estate spans multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines, making it hard to gain insights from your data. With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve simplified how you bring data into OneLake through two key Fabric capabilities: Shortcuts and a new data replication capability called Mirroring.

Shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without having to move and duplicate it. You can use shortcuts to combine your data—spread across different clouds, accounts, lines of businesses, and domains—into a virtualized data product tailored to your specific needs. We are excited to announce the general availability of shortcuts for OneLake, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3, and Microsoft Dataverse. Furthermore, we’ve added features like “Link to Microsoft Fabric” in Power Apps that directly link Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data to Fabric. These links empower low-code app builders to quickly explore their data and drive action from insights.

We are also excited to announce Mirroring, a new, frictionless way to add and manage existing cloud data warehouses and databases in Fabric’s Synapse Data Warehouse experience. Mirroring replicates a snapshot of the database to OneLake in Delta Parquet tables and keeps the replica in sync in near real time. Once the source database is attached, features like shortcuts, Direct Lake mode in Power BI, and our universal security model work instantly. We will soon enable Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Snowflake, and Mongo DB customers to use mirroring to access their data in OneLake, with more data sources coming in 2024.

Finally, we are also making it easier to analyze the vast amount of work data you have in Microsoft 365 with native integration into Microsoft Graph, the unified data model for products like Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Viva Insights, and more. Previously, Microsoft 365 data was only offered in JSON format, but it’s now also offered in Delta Parquet format for easy integration into OneLake.

With your data in OneLake, you can use domains, sub domains, and workspaces to organize your data into a logical data mesh. Doing so allows for federated governance and granular control while empowering everyone to find data using an intuitive, personalized data hub. Learn more about how you can optimize your data organization in OneLake here.

Empower every business user to work with data

Fostering a culture that empowers everyone to work with data and find data-driven answers to their questions is a vision shared by organizations around the world. And you can see why when data-driven organizations continually out-perform their counterparts. Organizations often start with business intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI which can provide the business with powerful insights and visuals. But achieving this vision requires more than just the right BI tool; it requires a well-orchestrated data estate that minimizes data fragmentation and makes it easy for business users to find continually up-to-date, accurate data. By combining Power BI and OneLake, your data estate finally has the tools you need to realize the goals of your data culture.

In May 2023, we announced Direct Lake mode in Power BI, now generally available, which provides a blazing fast, real-time connection to your data—ensuring only one copy of the data is created and your report is always up to date. We are announcing an expansion of Direct Lake mode to support Power BI semantic models on Fabric Warehouses, generally available, and stored credentials for Direct Lake semantic models, in public preview. Stored credentials will enable you to apply row-level security (RLS) on Direct Lake datasets, ensuring users can only access the data for which they are authorized. For those working with import-mode semantic models using the large semantic model storage, we are announcing the public preview of OneLake integration—enabling you to add your import-mode semantic models to OneLake and use it with other Fabric workloads.

Beyond enhancing our connection with OneLake, we are also announcing a set of new tools that make it even easier for business users to uncover the insights they need. This includes the public preview of Explore, a new feature that helps you learn more about your semantic model without building a report and DAX Query View which provides BI developers with an easier way to use DAX queries. You can learn more about all these announcements by reading the Power BI at Ignite blog.

AI-powered: Prepare your data for game-changing AI

Generative AI represents not just the next generation of AI, but one of the biggest changes in computing in the last decade. As Satya Nadella put it at Microsoft Build 2023, “We went from the bicycle to the steam engine with the launch of ChatGPT.” Turn-key AI solutions like Copilot are already having an immediate impact on the productivity of adopters by helping them focus on higher value activities. As mentioned above, we are thrilled to announce that Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now in public preview, including the experiences for Power BI, Data Factory, Data Science, and Data Engineering. Learn more about Copilot in Fabric here.

However, these out-of-the-box solutions are only the beginning of the benefits generative AI can have on your organization. Organization-specific, or even team-specific, use cases can help your employees scale in amazing ways. These custom experiences require two key ingredients: a data platform that can help you unify, prepare, and model your data and an AI platform that can utilize this data with break-through AI models. Microsoft now has the ideal answer to both requirements: Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Studio. The recently announced Azure AI Studio, in public preview, is a one-stop-shop to seamlessly explore, build, evaluate, and deploy AI solutions using state-of-the-art AI tools and machine learning models, grounded in responsible AI practices.

We are thrilled to announce the seamless integration between Azure AI Studio and Microsoft Fabric—powering a new era in AI-driven innovation. With this potent combination, you can confidently build AI solutions and custom models in Azure AI Studio using data integrated and cleaned in Microsoft Fabric. In Azure AI Studio, developers can run models against data from OneLake and any other data supported by Fabric shortcuts, including Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Amazon S3. Azure AI Search can store, index, and retrieve data, including vector embeddings, from any of these sources through OneLake. Learn more about this integration in the Azure AI Studio and Microsoft Fabric blog.

Maximize your existing Microsoft analytics investments

Existing Azure Synapse Analytics customers

The next generation of Azure Synapse Analytics has fueled the creation of Microsoft Fabric. With this solid foundation, we can empower new, unprecedented ways of deploying pipelines, data warehousing, data engineering, data science, and real-time analytics technologies to simplify and increase the efficiency of your solutions. But what does this mean if you are an existing Azure Synapse Analytics customer?

We will continue to fully support the Azure Synapse Analytics platform as a service (PaaS) product. This includes supporting our users fixing product bugs, and not compromising the security of the platform in any way. You can continue to deploy, operate, and expand your Azure Synapse Analytics solution. 

However, you’ve likely already started thinking about a Microsoft Fabric future for your analytics solutions. To help you on this journey, we’ve published an end-to-end guide to Fabric blog for existing Synapse customers to help you plan your upgrade strategy of your current workloads.

Existing Azure Databricks customers

We believe the future of analytics and AI applications is built on an open and governed lakehouse foundation, enabling you to combine the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses. That’s why Microsoft Fabric embraces an open and governed lakehouse as the underlying SaaS storage, standardizing on Delta Parquet format—the same format our Azure Databricks customers use today.

This means Azure Databricks customers can seamlessly choose the analytics capabilities from Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, and other Azure products that work best for their scenarios, without the pain of integration. Using the ADLS Gen2 shortcut, you can bring your Azure Databricks data into OneLake without copying the data.

With that data in OneLake, an easy first use case is to use Direct Lake mode in Power BI to create a blazing fast, real-time connection to your Databricks data for your BI reports. And as a first party offering, Azure Databricks customers have easy access and native integration to many other Azure services—on top of the same open and governed lakehouse—reducing data estate fragmentation. You can learn more during the Microsoft Ignite 2023 session I am delivering, “Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks.”

Go further with partners

As always, you don’t have to do this alone. Our top global partners, Accenture and Capgemini have over 4,200 individuals trained on Microsoft Fabric and are ready to help you meet your analytics goals.

“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 and 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 and Data CEO of Capgemini.

With the surge of customer demand for Fabric, many partners have already completed the first wave of pilot projects during preview—helping customers unlock the early potential of Fabric. Our Microsoft engineering team worked closely with these partners to enhance their capacity and capabilities on Fabric, ensuring the successful delivery of customer implementations.

For example, Microsoft partner SDK Tek Services Ltd. implemented a Fabric solution with Regional Oil Sands Operating Alliance that reduced their data compilation time by 85 percent, enabling them to focus on their core business instead of managing data. In another project, Sonata Software worked with Alltech to empower their business users with self-service access to analytics and to remove the burden on their IT department. You can find more Fabric partners and their stories featured on Fabric partner website.

As a sample, here are some of the partners that successfully completed customer pilot project(s) on Fabric. Each of these partners are well positioned to drive meaningful business outcomes with Microsoft Fabric:

Learn more about the Fabric momentum driven by services partners in our Fabric Partner blog.

Join the ISV community building on Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric was created with ISVs in mind—built from the ground up to be extensible and open at every level. Fabric provides a rich set of capabilities that allow ISVs to accelerate their application development and create disruptive industry-leading offerings. This includes a new public preview, Fabric REST API that enables ISVs and our users to build custom applications, integrated systems, and automate deployment of environments within Fabric.

As an example, the London Stock Exchange Group, a leading provider of financial markets infrastructure, are adding their technology to Microsoft Fabric to give their customers easier data discovery and access, greater interoperability, and cost-effective digital rights management. Esri, a leading geographic information system (GIS) software company, have combined their industry-leading spatial analytics, powered by their ArcGIS, with Microsoft Fabric to accelerate time to insights and reveal unexplored patterns, trends, and connections for customers. SAS have infused their Intelligent Decisioning analytics technology with Microsoft Fabric to drive real-time interactions and define the next best actions at scale, providing unprecedented ability to automate decisions across the enterprise.

Learn more about the vibrant ecosystem of ISVs building on Fabric.

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for afree 60-day trial—no credit card information required. To start your free trial, sign up for a free account (Power BI customers can use their existing account), and once signed in, select start trial within the account manager tool in the Fabric app. Existing Power BI Premium customers can already access Microsoft Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page.

If you are considering purchasing Fabric, there is a selection of pricing options to help you minimize your cost and maximize your return. In June 2023, we announced pay-as-you-go prices for Fabric that allow you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. We are excited to announce reservation pricing for Fabric that will allow you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5 percent over the pay-as-you-go prices (excluding Power BI Capacity SKUs). You can pay for all your consumption, across every Fabric workload, with a single, unified bill and use the Capacity Metrics app to understand and track your usage. We are also announcing OneLake BCDR and cache storage prices, expanding on our already announced OneLake storage pricing. Check out all these pricing options on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page. 

With these announcements, current Power BI Premium per capacity customers have an additional pricing option to experience everything Fabric has to offer. Along with the pay-as-you-go option, Fabric customers also enjoy smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry level P-SKU. And since Fabric SKUs are eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), Fabric customers can deprecate their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment.

Join us at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

If you would like to gain hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it, join us from March 24-29, 2024 at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. We will bring together experts from Microsoft and the global analytics community to share, demo, and discuss the latest developments in Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and more. At this event, you will be able to learn from top data experts and AI leaders while having the chance to interact with your peers and share your story. We hope you will join us and see how cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft can enable your business success with the power of Microsoft Fabric. Register today.

Build the skills you need to take full advantage of Microsoft Fabric

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.

Engage with a vibrant community of data professionals to get all your Fabric questions answered, suggest new features, stay current on the latest updates, and so much more.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Watch the Microsoft Fabric Ignite sessions. 
• Reading more in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Exploring the Fabric technical documentation.
• Attending the Supercharge organizational analytics and democratize insights webinar to get an end-to-end view of Microsoft Fabric.
• Joining the Fabric community. 
• Learning more about Azure Innovate, our new offering to help you adopt AI. 

The post Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric—now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Microsoft Fabric

Bring your data into the era of AI

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Integrating ISV applications with Microsoft Fabric

We are excited to announce the paths for ISVs to integrate with Microsoft Fabric towards building a powerful ecosystem for all organizations. But before looking at these approaches, I want to share why organizations and ISVs should partner with us and build various levels of integrations with Fabric. The early momentum and feedback have been simply fantastic.

Three reasons to integrate with Microsoft Fabric

Unparalleled platform capabilities

At the heart of Microsoft Fabric is an open platform—with open formats, open interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs), and in the future—open platform integration software development kits (SDKs). For ISVs, this means the ability to weave their applications into a broader ecosystem with ease. Microsoft Fabric’s open architecture is bolstered by a rich set of APIs bringing secure access to all the customer’s data in a seamless way, which is often challenging for ISVs to access. In addition, Fabric is AI-powered with AI infused at every layer that ISVs can leverage as well to enhance their customer experience.

Reach, scalability, and growth

Microsoft Fabric will allow ISVs to reach hundreds of thousands of organizations. Integrating with this platform will bring an undeniable advantage for ISVs to expand their market. Built as a horizontal platform, it guarantees a huge reach and discoverability, from niche sectors to broad markets effortlessly. And while scalability is a prime advantage, it doesn’t come at the cost of security. Microsoft Fabric brings robust governance and security, allowing your user base to grow, while still staying secure. In addition, ISVs can leverage their existing business model via the Azure Marketplace including pay as you go approaches.

A collaborative ecosystem

Beyond the technological facets, Microsoft Fabric thrives as a community. It’s not just a platform but a collaborative ecosystem. ISVs, upon joining the Fabric community, immerse themselves in a rich pool of innovators, developers, and tech enthusiasts. This networked environment stimulates knowledge exchange, fosters potential partnerships, and enables ISVs to always have a sounding board for their innovations.

The paths to integrating with Microsoft Fabric

There are three approaches that ISVs can leverage to enable seamless integration with Fabric.

1. Inter-operate with Fabric: This is one of the easiest ways to leverage the power of the data that Fabric customers will store in OneLake. By enabling your application to work with OneLake in Fabric, using published APIs and SDKs, ISVs can make sure that their existing and new customers can have seamless experience with Fabric while using ISV applications. This approach is already being used by hundreds of ISVs.
2. Develop Apps on Fabric: Organizations and application providers can embed Fabric as part of their solution offerings, enabling rapid application development and deployment—using Fabric’s platform security, identity, storage, and compute model.
3. Build a Fabric workload: ISVs can provide a familiar look and feel of Fabric and make their applications discoverable from within the Fabric experience by extending Fabric’s capabilities through building a Fabric workload.

All ISVs can implement the first two approaches with Microsoft Fabric today. The third approach is still under development and is currently only accessible by invitation only.

Designing for the future

We are also excited to announce our collaboration with several industry-leading ISVs who have been demonstrating the possibilities of bringing their product experiences as workloads into Fabric, widening their reach and breadth of capabilities.

Microsoft and LSEG are collaborating to bring LSEG’s financial markets intelligence offerings into Fabric as first-class experiences to customers in the financial services industry and beyond. We are incredibly excited about this collaboration that will allow our joint customers to derive more value from LSEG’s high-value financial data and their unique data transformation capabilities.

“LSEG’s trusted financial markets intelligence natively integrated into Microsoft Fabric, will make data access, discovery and digital rights management easier and more cost effective for our customers. In collaboration with Microsoft, we are empowering our customers to focus on creating unique insights bringing the transformational power of Generative AI.”—Dmitri Sedov, Global Group Head, Data Intelligence.

For businesses relying on spatial analytics, Esri is helping transform decision-making with spatial insights that will be enabled directly within the Microsoft Fabric experience, powered by their ArcGIS service.

“Esri and Microsoft are reshaping how everyone works with data. Now data professionals will have direct access to core Esri capabilities inside of their Microsoft Fabric environment. We are pleased to advance our important work with Microsoft and see the power of spatial insights unlocked for our shared customers.”—Jack Dangermond, President of Esri.

Informatica is delivering its AI-powered Cloud Data Management solution as a unified experience with Microsoft Fabric, addressing customers’ critical data challenges to find, understand, govern, and trust data.

SAS Intelligent Decisioning engine integrated into Microsoft Fabric will drive real-time interactions, and define the next best actions at scale, providing unprecedented ability to automate decisions across the enterprise.

Teradata is delivering its AI Unlimited serverless AI/machine learning engine via Microsoft Fabric enabling customers to go beyond SQL and extract additional value from their data, all stored in an open format in OneLake.

The combination of mass distribution, instant access to the customer’s data estate, and a strong community is getting enthusiastic reactions from ISVs, serving the needs of customers across industry verticals and horizontals. We’d love for you to get familiar with and evaluate Microsoft Fabric as an open platform for your application.

Learn more about Microsoft Fabric

• Watch the ISV session at Microsoft Ignite 2023.
• Check out the pathways to integrate with Fabric.
• Nominate to Azure Innovate for comprehensive investments.
• Publish to the Commercial Marketplace.

The post Build ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric: The open platform appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

To help overcome these challenges, we introduced Microsoft Fabric in early 2023.

The Microsoft Fabric blog channel

Microsoft Fabric delivers an integrated and streamlined software as a service (SaaS) experience for all analytics workloads and data teams on an enterprise grade data foundation. It enables persistent data governance and a single capacity pricing model that scales with your growth—and it’s open at every layer with no proprietary lock-ins. With a single, unified platform, the effort of managing an integrated analytics service, including governance, security, and billing, is reduced and simplified.

In this new blog channel, we’ll address topics that help you navigate the world of analytics. Expect to see thought leadership content, customer and partner case studies, best practices, Fabric product announcements, and more.

Can’t wait to get started? Join us at Microsoft Ignite.

Microsoft Ignite 2023

See how Fabric enables AI at Microsoft Ignite

Register now

Experience AI transformation in action at Microsoft Ignite

At Microsoft Ignite 2023, experience AI transformation in action with Fabric. Discover the latest technology, advance your skills, and find solutions to your technical roadblocks. Learn how to create more value from your data by leveraging Fabric and AI solutions, while effectively integrating and managing your data estate. The in-person event is sold out, but you can still register to join us online on November 15 and 16, 2023 to learn from experts in the industry across keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more.

And no surprise, Ignite will also be the place to learn how Fabric addresses core analytics workloads by combining the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.

Harness your data estate for the era of AI

With dozens of sessions covering Fabric, Ignite will help you understand how to harness your data estate to deliver powerful AI applications. It all kicks off with Jessica Hawk, Arun Ulagaratchagan, and Amir Netz delivering the Make your data AI ready with Fabric and Azure Databricks​ session. You’ll learn how to unlock value and prepare your data for the era of AI with Fabric and Azure Databricks. Join this demo-heavy session where we’ll show how Fabric enables data governance while integrating Power BI, Data Factory, and the next generation of Synapse to offer users a modern, price performant analytics solution.

Don’t miss additional breakout sessions and discussions to continue your learning, including:

• Build ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric in the Intelligent Data Platform​ with Dipti Borkar.
  • Learn how to accelerate your application development and increase your appeal with Fabric customers by building your apps in the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.

• Unify your data across domains, clouds, and engines in OneLake​ with Joshua Caplan, Priya Sathy, and Amir Netz.
  • Learn how to use OneLake to unify your data across clouds, accounts, and engines faster and more efficiently than ever before, including data in Azure Databricks. No matter where your data is, OneLake can accelerate your data potential.

• Build powerful AI apps with Copilot in Microsoft Fabric​ with Justyna Lucznik and Nellie Gustafsson.
  • Build new analytics and AI models and increase developer productivity with Copilot in Fabric. Learn how to empower your data scientists and data analysts by bridging the world of business intelligence and AI. Democratize AI to increase collaboration between data and machine learning professionals.

• Migrating your data estate to Fabric and getting started Q&A with Justyna Lucznik, Priya Sathy, Wee Hyong Tok, and Amir Netz.
  • Not sure where to get started? Join our product experts to ask questions and get answers to common questions like how to migrate to Fabric from Synapse and start proofs of concept with departments where you want to gain traction quickly.

Don’t delay—register for Microsoft Ignite today and bookmark the Fabric blog for future announcements, updates, and insights.

• If you are unable to attend Ignite 2023 live, these sessions will be available on-demand after the event to registered attendees

The new Microsoft Fabric Blog

Navigate the world of analytics

Learn more

The post Welcome to the Microsoft Fabric blog appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

As part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare today, we are announcing the preview of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This tailored offering enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at scale. Leveraging the native capabilities of the platform, health organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower their workforce, and unlock value from clinical and operational data.  

With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, your organization can accelerate time-to-value using healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to unify your data at every layer—one copy of data in the lake, one product experience for collaboration, governance, and unification of the business model to ensure resources are cost-optimized.  

Get more value from your data 

This preview delivers data solutions that leverage Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse architecture to support the ingestion, unification, harmonization, and transformation of multi-modal healthcare data from disparate sources. Combining data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as electronic health records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems, and medical devices enables organizations to bring structured, unstructured, imaging, and medical device data into one common architecture.

The functionality in this preview consists of lakehouse foundations, with data ingestion mechanisms and analytical capabilities. Lakehouse architecture in Microsoft Fabric combines both data lakes and data warehouses, storing data in open delta-parquet format. This enables customers to run large-scale analytical scenarios in a cost-effective manner.

These healthcare data solutions provide full support for industry standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)®R4 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics in the lakehouse. This unified data foundation in the Microsoft Fabric data lake will allow healthcare organizations to: 

WHAT IS SPARK COMPUTE IN MICROSOFT FABRIC?Learn more 

• Process, store, manage, and govern structured and unstructured data in a single, unified repository preserving complete data fidelity. With the ability to do delta-time travel, it ensures data consistency by way of providing data lineage and auditing. 
• Structured query language (SQL) endpoints attached to each lakehouse simplify the ability to explore and interact with the data in bronze, silver, and gold lakehouses using SQL. 
• Leverage Microsoft Fabric data engineering and data science capabilities to conduct data analysis and operationalize machine learning pipelines at scale using Python notebooks powered by Spark’s distributed computing capabilities. 
• Preserve and analyze historical data to create longitudinal patient health records to conduct patient and population-level proactive and retrospective research studies. 
• Build patient cohorts to proactively initiate patient outreach or conduct clinical research studies based on disease cohorts to guide clinical care pathways for patients. 

Here are some of the capabilities being released in preview: 

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data ingestion. Enables easy ingestion of FHIR data from Azure Health Data Services in Microsoft Fabric Onelake environment and stores it in the bronze lakehouse as raw newline-delimited JavaScript object notation (NDJSON) files.

Relational FHIR data foundation enables the transformation of FHIR data in bronze to relational FHIR and tabular structure in open data format (delta-parquet) in Silver Lakehouse using highly scalable purpose-built pipelines. This creates a standard-based unified healthcare data model in Silver Data Lake. With support for all FHIR R4 resources, this now enables multiple downstream analytics support for scenarios leveraging the rich clinical, financial (claims and explanation of benefits), and administration data. Healthcare companies and partners can now build analytical scenarios such as quality reporting, population health management, clinical research studies, and operational reporting. It also allows a traditional SQL engine to run on top of the data for a data analyst to conduct ad-hoc exploratory analysis of the healthcare data. 

WHAT IS TEXT ANALYTICS FOR HEALTH?Read more 

Enrich unstructured clinical notes enables conversion of unstructured clinical notes to structured clinical data through purpose-built data pipelines leveraging the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of Microsoft Azure Text Analytics for Health. It enriches a patient’s clinical profile with additional insights coming from handwritten physician’s notes in their interactions with a patient and captured in clinical notes. This data can then be analyzed to produce insights, analytics, prediction, or quality measures to improve patient health outcomes. 

De-identifying clinical data for research and secondary uses enables health organizations to de-identify clinical data such that the resulting data retains its clinical relevance and distribution while also adhering to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule. The service currently supports unstructured text and will soon cover various other data types (structured and imaging). The service uses state-of-the-art machine learning models to automatically extract, redact, or surrogate over 30 entities—including HIPAA’s 18 personal health identifiers (PHI)—from unstructured text such as clinical notes, messages, or clinical trial studies. The service also offers best practices for PHI protection in the form of surrogate replacement, where PHI elements are replaced with plausible-looking surrogates; resulting in data that is most representative of the source data.

Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics enables clinical researchers to perform research and analysis using the standard OMOP v5.4 Common Data Model. Hydrate OMOP schema transforming the relational FHIR data in silver to OMOP datasets using purpose-built pipelines.  

Once hydrated, users can use notebooks to build statistical models, population distribution studies and Power BI reports to visually compare different interventions and their effects on patient outcomes. Researchers can now quickly do ad-hoc analysis, using SQL or notebooks. Examples include tracking disease state progress over time, comparing procedures and drug exposures, or comparing drug exposures and condition occurrences. 

Patient Outreach analytics enables segmentation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with ease by ingestion of healthcare data in Silver Lake without requiring any custom transformation of heavily nested FHIR data. Now it is even easier for care providers to understand patients, create comprehensive segments, and enhance outreach communications, thus fostering the expansion of patient base and revenue streams at a swifter pace. Plans are also in the works to support bringing data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Patient Outreach journey application templates to Microsoft Fabric, enabling unified marketing and clinical reporting. 

Data governance with Microsoft Purview. Within our new healthcare data solutions (preview) in Microsoft Purview, healthcare organizations can better govern, protect, and manage their entire data estate by leveraging features like: 

• Healthcare classification templates to categorize and classify data, based on predefined rules and patterns, to put for HIPAA-specified identifiers.  
• Data glossary of FHIR entities provides a common data glossary across the organization reducing the potential for data misunderstanding and errors.  

Explore possibilities with AI

Analytics-ready data available in a single data estate makes it easier to leverage the power of AI and machine learning. Today, we also announced new capabilities across Microsoft Azure to help healthcare organizations use AI and machine learning to derive insights to improve clinicians’ experiences and patient outcomes. Key to healthcare organizations:  

• General availability of multi-language support in Text Analytics for Health, a Microsoft Azure AI Language service, allowing organizations to derive insights from unstructured text in seven languages. 
• Expansion of our Microsoft Azure AI Health Bot in preview to allow healthcare organizations to build copilots for their healthcare professionals to further manage administrative and clinical workloads. 
• Adding three new built-in models to Azure AI Health Insights to provide insights and inferences to clinicians for better decision-making.  

Read the latest from the Microsoft Azure team to learn about new data and AI services in Microsoft Azure. 

What’s next

If you are interested in healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and Purview, please reach out to your Microsoft account team or Partner Development Manager for more information and eligibility criteria. 

• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Introducing Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI
• The Microsoft commitment to responsible AI

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care.

Discover capabilities 

The post Unlock data value with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

In this post, we’ll discuss the value of Microsoft Fabric for embedded solutions and give you all the details on how to get started with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI embedded.

About Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI. Read the full release update here.

About Power BI embedded

Power BI embedded analytics allows you to embed your Power BI items such as reports, dashboards and tiles, in a web application or in a website. You can:

• Deliver compelling data experiences for your end users, enabling them to take action based on insights from your solutions data.
• Quickly and easily provide exceptional customer-facing reports, dashboards, and analytics in your own apps by using and branding Power BI as your own.

Capacity and SKUs updates for Power BI embedded analytics

Until today, Power BI embedded analytics offered two publishing solutions, each with different SKUs.

• Power BI Embedded – an Azure offering aimed at ISVs and developers, using A SKUs
• Power BI Premium – a Microsoft Office offering that includes embedding Power BI, geared toward enterprises looking for a complete BI solution, using EM or P SKUs

With the introduction of Microsoft Fabric, we’re excited to inform you that embedding Power BI is now also available with all the new Microsoft Fabric capacities.

Power BI embedded with Microsoft Fabric Capacities (F SKUs)

Microsoft Fabric capacities allow you to create and share Fabric content and leverage Fabric for your applications. Microsoft Fabric provides all the capabilities required for a developer to extract insights from data and present it to the business user, whether it is within Fabric or embedded in external applications.

Microsoft Fabric capacities come in a wide range of SKUs, each with different resource tiers for memory and computing power, so you can find the SKU that best fits your application needs.  Embedding Power BI artifacts is supported with the whole range of F SKUs. Read more about the different available licenses here.

Just like the familiar A SKUs, F SKUs can be used for as long as you want without any commitment. Pricing is regional and billing is made on a per second basis with a minimum of one minute.

Some additional capabilities with F SKUs include:

• Pay as you go with no time commitment.
• You can scale your capacity up or down using the Azure portal.
• You can pause and resume your capacity as needed.

Fabric capacities also offer a lower entry level, which can be ideal for ISVs and smaller organizations looking to explore Microsoft Fabric and embedded analytics with Power BI. Meanwhile, the higher-level F SKUs allow free users to view Shared Power BI items in any workspace that has such a capacity assigned to it.

During the preview of Microsoft Fabric, you can also enjoy the Microsoft Fabric (Preview) trial, which includes access to the Fabric product experiences and the resources to create and host Fabric items. The Fabric Trial is available for 60 days and can be upgraded to a Fabric capacity once the trial runs out. Once your workspace is upgraded to a trial capacity, you can embed any Power BI item in the workspace just like you could with an A or P SKU previously. 

Power BI embedded with A SKUs

Power BI embedded continues to work smoothly with A SKUs, regardless of whether Microsoft Fabric has been enabled in the organization or not. This means that you can freely explore Microsoft Fabric in other workspaces, while maintaining your existing A SKU assigned workspaces used for embedding.

However, keep in mind that A SKUs do not support Microsoft Fabric. If you wish to create Fabric items in an A SKU workspace, you will be prompted to migrate the workspace to a Fabric capacity or Fabric Trial.

Additionally, you will not be able to reassign workspaces with Fabric capacities or a Fabric Trial that include Fabric items to an A SKU.

Git Integration 

Another exciting release with Microsoft Fabric is git integration, which enables developers to integrate their development processes, tools, and best practices straight into Microsoft Fabric workspaces.  

For Power BI embedded users, this introduces a whole new way to easily manage and control versions of embedded reports. You’ll be able work in Power BI desktop to develop your Power BI reports and datasets, and check in your changes to git to collaborate and manage your Power BI content as you do with your app’s code. From there you can sync the content back to your Fabric workspace to ensure everything stays up to date. 

Read the full release update here. 

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for the free trial—no credit card information required. Everyone who signs up gets a fixed Fabric trial capacity, which may be used for any feature or capability from integrating data to creating machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, Fabric will be enabled for all Power BI tenants.

Sign up for the free trial. For more information read Fabric trial docs.

Other resources

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website
• Reading the more in-depth Fabric experience announcement blogs:
  • Data Factory experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Engineering experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Science experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Warehousing experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Real-Time Analytics experience in Fabric blog
  • Power BI announcement blog
  • Data Activator experience in Fabric blog
  • Administration and governance in Fabric blog
  • OneLake in Fabric blog
  • Microsoft 365 data integration in Fabric blog
  • Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric integration blog
• Exploring the Fabric technical documentation
• Reading the free e-book on getting started with Fabric
• Exploring Fabric through the Guided Tour
• Watching the free Fabric webinar series
• Joining the Fabric community to post your questions, share your feedback, and learn from others
• Visiting Microsoft Fabric Ideas to submit suggestions for improvements and vote on your peers’ ideas

To learn more about Power BI embedded, consider:

• Exploring the Power BI Embedded Playground
• Power BI embedded analytics overview – Power BI | Microsoft Learn
• GitHub – microsoft/PowerBI-Developer-Samples: A collection of Power BI samples for developer use.

The post Power BI embedded with Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Prior to our official announcement of Microsoft Fabric at Build 2023, MVPs had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the product. For several months, they have been actively testing Fabric and gaining valuable insights. Now, their enthusiasm for the product is evident as they eagerly share their knowledge and thoughts about Microsoft Fabric with the community.

Discover content created by MVPs following the announcement of Microsoft Fabric. Dive into a collection that includes blogs, videos, articles, live streams, podcasts, and more. Delve into these valuable resources and immerse yourself in the wealth of knowledge and insights shared by our esteemed MVP community. Enjoy reading, watching, and listening to these informative resources!

Videos and podcasts

Blog posts and articles

Upcoming live streams

• [May 26^th] Empower BI Professionals to Do More Using Microsoft Fabric with Reid Havens and Christian Wade (Microsoft)
• [May 26^th] Microsoft Fabric: A Game-Changer for Cloud Computing? with Chris Wagner
• [May 31^st] Data Science Made Easy with Synapse: A Live Stream Tutorial with Nellie Gustafsson with Chris Wagner and Nellie Gustafsson (Microsoft)
• [June 5^th] Josh Caplan and Elizabeth Oldag on Microsoft OneLake: The Future of Data Lakehouse with Chris Wagner, Josh Caplan (Microsoft) and Elizabeth Oldag (Microsoft)
• [June 7^th] Real Time Analytics with Tzvia Gitlin Troyna, Principal PM at Microsoft with Chris Wagner and Tzvia Goltlin-Troyna (Microsoft)
• [June 14^th] Mark Kromer & Miguella de Boer – Azure Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric: Next Gen Data Integration with Chris Wagner, Mark Kromer (Microsoft) and Miguella de Boer (Microsoft)

Call to action

Take the following actions to stay informed about the latest developments:

• Check out the content listed above.
• If you like the content, consider subscribing to the blogs or YouTube channels of the MVPs to gain access to a wealth of additional knowledge about Microsoft Fabric.
• Try Microsoft Fabric if you haven’t so far: https://aka.ms/try-fabric.
• Join the Fabric community: https://aka.ms/fabriccommunity. You can meet MVPs there as well!

The post Learn about Microsoft Fabric from MVPs appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.