Microsoft anticipated this shift early on. We invested heavily in real-time services in Azure, including Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, and Data Explorer, powering mission-critical real-time workloads for years for both Microsoft and our customers and delivering proven reliability, performance, and planet scale.

But the decisive step was building Real-Time Intelligence into Microsoft Fabric on top of that mature foundation in Azure. Real-Time Intelligence unifies streaming, analytics, and action in one governed platform, bringing batch and streaming together in OneLake and Fabric.

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025, which we view as a strong validation of our strategy and execution. This position as a leader is the result of our long-term conviction rather than short-term reaction. Microsoft invested early so organizations would have a mature, scalable real-time foundation exactly when the need became urgent, and that foresight is now paying off for customers.

A Leader for the Real-Time Enterprise

Forrester’s 2025 evaluation confirms a clear market shift: enterprises are moving away from fragmented real-time architectures and toward unified platforms that can support AI-driven decisions at digital speed. As Forrester notes, “AI agents rely on seamless data flow across ingestion, transformation, and real-time insights to avoid bottlenecks and cascading errors. A robust platform unifies these workloads (messaging, processing, analytics), eliminating silos and latency that degrade decision quality.” In this environment, a fully integrated streaming platform has become essential rather than optional.

This is exactly where Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric stands out. Forrester notes that Microsoft’s strategy is to bring dozens of services together under a single umbrella, making real-time development and event-driven analytics “second nature” within Fabric. Real-time data becomes a first-class citizen in Fabric’s unified data estate. Streaming signals land directly into OneLake, the same foundation that powers the lakehouse, warehouse, semantic models, governance, Power BI, and AI agents.

Forrester’s assessment is clear: “Microsoft excels at messaging, analytics, governance, developer experience, business user experience, and more, enabling robust performance for real-time analytics and event-driven applications. It provides seamless integration within the Fabric ecosystem to support enterprise use cases like predictive analytics and operational dashboards. It offers strong tooling for both technical and business users as well as deep integration with Azure services, empowering enterprises to build real-time solutions.”

This recognition reflects a platform designed from the start to work as one coherent system, not a set of loosely assembled services. It is an end-to-end real-time platform that strengthens the entire data estate and positions organizations to run AI-driven operations with clarity, speed, and confidence.

Why Enterprises Are Standardizing on Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Real-Time Intelligence delivers a complete end-to-end platform for understanding and acting on what is happening across the enterprise in the moment. It unifies signals across time, space, and relationships to provide a connected operational picture rather than isolated dashboards or fragmented telemetry. Every stage of the real-time lifecycle (streaming, analyzing, modeling, visualizing, and acting) is integrated into one governed, AI-ready system. This coherence is what enables teams and AI agents to work from one live, trusted view of the business and make high-quality decisions at digital speed.

The Real-Time Hub is the unified experience that makes every enterprise signal visible, governed, and ready for use. It brings all the capabilities of Real-Time Intelligence together into a coherent operational fabric, the live nervous system of the modern enterprise.

Across five major areas, these capabilities form a complete real-time platform:

• Stream: Eventstream ingests, shapes, filters, and enriches data in motion, while Connectors pulls data from dozens of streaming sources, including Kafka, MQTT, IoT systems, SaaS apps, and CDC feeds. Event Schema Set standardizes events to keep signals consistent, interoperable, and easy to govern.
• Analyze: Real-time and historical insights converge in Eventhouse, a high-performance engine for interactive analytics over petabyte-scale data. Anomaly Detector highlights deviations and emerging risks the moment they appear.
• Model: Fabric’s modeling layer enables unified operational awareness. Graph links signals to entities and relationships, Fabric Map situates them in physical space, and Digital Twin Builder models assets and environments over time.
• Visualize: KQL Querysets enable fast, interactive analytics for exploring data and diagnosing problems, Graph Querysets for relational and causal patterns across the business, and Real-Time Dashboards for intuitive, no-code views of live conditions and trends.
• Act: Activator detects patterns over time on a per-instance basis and triggers alerts or workflows through visual no-code business rules. Operations Agent monitors your operations, reasons about your business, and takes automated actions based on natural language instructions.

How Fabric IQ Completes the Intelligence Layer

We recently introduced Fabric IQ (see blog post), the intelligence layer that transforms unified data into unified understanding for every team and every AI agent. IQ brings a semantic, reasoning-ready foundation to the entire Fabric platform, including Real-Time Intelligence, so organizations can interpret what is happening across their business, not just observe it. It augments human and AI workflows with natural language understanding, contextual reasoning, and a unified live view drawn from both streaming and historical data.

IQ enables natural-language exploration across all your data in Fabric, allowing users to ask questions, investigate anomalies, and understand relationships without writing code. It synthesizes patterns across time, space, and relationships, surfaces anomalies, explains correlations, and identifies root causes. This shift is what elevates Fabric from a data platform to an enterprise intelligence platform, one where insights are generated, connected, and immediately actionable.

IQ amplifies the power of Real-Time Intelligence. Streaming events stop being isolated signals and become part of a live coherent semantic picture: operators can ask why something happened, analysts can explore emerging risks and opportunities, and AI agents can reason over business meaning before taking action. Because IQ relies on the same governance, semantics, and security as the rest of Fabric, the insights it produces are consistent, trustworthy, and grounded in the organization’s shared data estate.

Together, Real-Time Intelligence and IQ create a unified real-time decision system. Real-Time Intelligence senses what is happening in the moment; IQ interprets it and drives the next action. This seamless integration enables enterprises and their AI agents to operate with precision even as conditions change second by second.

Strategic Takeaways for Enterprise Leaders

Real-time intelligence is becoming core to modern enterprise operations, no longer a specialist capability or an add-on component. AI requires up-to-date, contextualized data. Decision systems must unify batch and streaming data. And governance and semantics must extend across the entire data estate, from historical tables to real-time streams, to ensure trust, lineage, compliance, and safe AI behavior.

Microsoft Fabric, with Real-Time Intelligence and IQ, offers a decisive foundation for this new era. It brings together data, meaning, and action in one governed platform. It unifies time, space, and relationships to give enterprises a complete operational picture. And it supports AI-driven decisions at digital speed while strengthening governance, reliability, and trust.

As organizations modernize their data platforms and adopt AI at scale, Fabric provides the clarity, coherence, and confidence they need to run their business in real time and to thrive in the decade ahead.

Statement from Forrester

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrest’s objectivity here.

Learn More

Presentations

• BRK222: Create a semantic foundation for your AI agents in Microsoft Fabric
• BRK226: Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI

Conferences

• Join us at FabCon in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16-20, 2026. Register and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of the current Early Access pricing!

Resources

• Explore the docs
• Find customer success stories
• Follow a tutorial
• Try an in-depth tutorial
• Complete the learning path
• Get certified
• Sign up for one-day training

The post Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence: A Leader in the 2025 Forrester Streaming Data Wave appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

In this blog post, I’ll highlight the new zero-ETL, zero-copy sources in OneLake, deeper interoperability between OneLake and Microsoft Foundry, and new tools to help admins manage capacity, security, and governance at scale. Together, these updates further cement Fabric as the ideal data platform for your mission-critical workloads—open, integrated, secure, and built to connect every part of your data estate to the intelligence your business needs. 

What I’m covering here is only part of the story. For a deeper look at our new workload called Fabric IQ, new bidirectional interoperability with SAP and Salesforce, the general availability of Fabric Databases, and several other major announcements, I encourage you to read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data. 

Unify your entire data estate with Microsoft OneLake

With Microsoft OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud and on-premises data estate through a single, unified data lake that spans your organization. Once connected, your data is centrally managed through the OneLake catalog—a unified layer for access, governance, security, and discovery. Today, the OneLake catalog is trusted by more than 230,000 organizations worldwide, including 95% of the Fortune 500, and is seamlessly accessible from familiar tools like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Teams. 

Now, we’re introducing new capabilities that make it even easier to bring all your data into OneLake, connect it to intelligent agents, and manage it with stronger governance and security. 

New mirroring and shortcuts sources for SAP, Microsoft 365, and Azure Databases

We’re excited to introduce new ways to unify your data in OneLake with a zero-ETL approach. Mirroring for PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL Server versions 2016-2022 and 2025, are now generally available. We are also announcing the preview of Mirroring for SAP, powered by SAP Datasphere, which enables seamless data replication from SAP systems into OneLake. This is in addition to our announcement of bidirectional integration with SAP BDC. Whether you’ve adopted SAP BDC or not, you can now access your SAP data in OneLake. We’re also bringing Iceberg support in Snowflake mirroring into general availability. By mirroring these sources, you can eliminate the need for ETL processes and get Delta tables optimized for analytics. Try these mirroring sources today or learn more in the Data Integration Blog. 

We are also announcing the preview of shortcuts to SharePoint and OneDrive, allowing you to bring your unstructured, productivity data into OneLake without copying files or building custom ETL flows. You can use these unstructured files to train agents or to provide relevant context alongside your structured data. And, as business users make changes to their spreadsheets, documents, and PDFs in SharePoint and OneDrive, the files in OneLake always remain up to date. Try these shortcuts today.

Connect your multi-cloud data estate to agents with Foundry IQ 

Today, Microsoft announced Foundry IQ by Azure AI Search: the next generation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Agents rely on context— Foundry IQ’s knowledge bases deliver high-value context to agents by simplifying access to multiple data sources and making connections across information. You can use the OneLake knowledge source in Foundry IQ to connect agents to multi-cloud sources like AWS S3, on-premises sources, and structured and unstructured data across your data estate—all without creating copies or introducing data sprawl. With knowledge bases in Foundry IQ, your AI developers can build agents that are grounded in curated, governed data from Microsoft 365 Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and the web for more accurate app responses and informed decision-making. Try the Foundry IQ knowledge base today. 

Take a look at how you can use shortcuts and mirroring to bring all your data sources together in OneLake and use it to power the next generation of intelligent agents in Foundry:  

Enhancing governance for admins and data security in the OneLake catalog 

Over the last year, we’ve expanded the OneLake catalog to become the central place to discover, manage, govern, and secure your data in Fabric. Today, we are expanding its capabilities even further.

We are also upgrading the OneLake catalog Govern tab with a new preview experience designed for admins. From a centralized dashboard, Fabric admins can now view out-of-the-box insights on domain and capacity inventory, workspace operations, protection status, and curation. They can dive deeper with detailed Power BI reports, take recommended actions to quickly resolve issues, or even chat with Copilot to better understand the insights—all in one place. We are also expanding Copilot’s capabilities to automatically generate summaries for semantic models with a single click, providing quick insights and improving your exploration and decision making.

We are also releasing new ReadWrite permissions for OneLake security, allowing teams to configure folder-level write access within lakehouses so contributors can write data without needing full contributor or higher roles in the workspace. Learn how to start using OneLake security. 

Together, all of these enhancements make OneLake not just a data lake, but a strategic control plane for enterprise data—curated, connected, and ready for AI. Whether you’re building agents, dashboards, or operational workflows, OneLake helps ensure your data is always where you need it, when you need it, and in the format that drives action. 

Confidently deploy and manage the Fabric platform with new network security features and capacity management tools

As you scale your data operations with Fabric, reliability and security are non-negotiable. With that in mind, we are announcing new capabilities designed to help you maintain uninterrupted performance during peak demand and uncompromising protection for sensitive data. 

Expanded network security controls for your Fabric workloads 

On the security front, Outbound Access Protection—which allows you to restrict outbound connections to only approved endpoints—is being extended to cover dataflows, data pipelines, and OneLake shortcuts, in addition to the recently announced coverage for Fabric data warehouses and SQL Analytics Endpoints. While these extensions will be in preview in early 2026, OAP support for Spark and SQL Analytics Endpoints is already generally available. Coming soon, we are also releasing Tenant API for OAP, allowing tenant admins the ability to see the workspaces which have OAP enabled. 

We also recently released Customer-Managed Keys into general availability, empowering organizations to encrypt their data using their own keys. Now we are extending Customer Managed Keys to support keys stored in Azure Key Vaults deployed behind a firewall and use in SQL Databases in Fabric, now in preview.  

New Fabric capacity tools to help you optimize costs and avoid throttling  

To help you gain control over the jobs running on your Fabric capacities, we are expanding surge protection and introducing a new tool called Fabric capacity overage—both of which will be released into preview in Q1 2026—and adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. First, surge protection will now let you set limits on specific workspace activity to protect your capacities from unexpected surges from non-critical workspaces.  

We are also releasing Fabric capacity overage which admins can turn on for specific capacities, allowing them to automatically pay for excess consumption and avoid throttling whenever high-traffic periods occur. Rather than over-provisioning for rare spikes, you can right-size your capacity for typical usage and enable overage only when needed. Admins can even set a 24-hour limit so you don’t break your budget, and the feature can be toggled on or off in seconds. These tools are designed to work together to help you prevent over-use and maintain smooth, uninterrupted operations even during peak demand.

Finally, we’re excited to announce we are adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. It’s a highly requested feature now in preview that provides the ability to analyze capacity events in real-time and respond appropriately. Fabric capacity events will provide real-time data for two event types: Capacity Summary (smoothed metrics every 30 seconds) and Capacity State (instant updates on changes like pauses or throttling).  

See more Microsoft Fabric innovation  

At Ignite, we announced several transformative enhancements to Microsoft Fabric that will help organizations unify their data estates and power the next generation of AI apps and agents. We’re introducing the preview of Fabric IQ, a new workload in Fabric that unifies your data with operational systems under a semantic model of business entities and their relationships—providing a live, connected view of the enterprise. We are announcing the general availability of SQL and Cosmos databases in Fabric, giving developers world-class database engines that provision in seconds—and deliver a simple, autonomous, secure, and AI-optimized foundation for modern applications.

We are also expanding interoperability with SAP, Salesforce, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake to enable bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing between their platforms and Fabric. Finally, we are weaving AI into the places you work every day with enhancements to Fabric data agents, Copilot in Power BI, and Fabric operations agents. To dive deeper into these milestone innovations, read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data. 

You can also learn more about everything else we are bringing to Fabric by reading the Fabric November 2025 Feature summary blog, the Power BI November feature summary blog, or by exploring the latest blogs on the Fabric Updates channel.  

Join us at FabCon Atlanta  

Looking for a dedicated event on Microsoft Fabric? Join us at the 3^rd annual Fabric Community Conference this year in Atlanta, Georgia from March 16-20, 2026, for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, community networking, and everything else you love about FabCon. And we are ecstatic that SQLCon 2026 is now officially part of the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, bringing together two powerhouse communities in SQL and Fabric.  

You can Register today for either event or get full access to both. And use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current Early Access pricing!

Challenge yourself and get certified in Microsoft Fabric 

Unify your data, unlock real-time insights, and kickstart your journey to becoming a certified Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer—join the DP-600 Skills Challenge today.  

Build smarter pipelines, unify your data estate, and take the next step toward DP-700 certification—start the Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer Skills Challenge today.  

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 

•  Microsoft Fabric Latest Upgrades: What’s New in 2025? by Kanerika Inc. 
• Workforce Optimization with Microsoft Fabric Data Agent by Smartbridge 
• Let’s get real: Real business outcomes with Microsoft Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence by Valtech 
• Finance at the Speed of Innovation by Protiviti 
• 6 Things You Should Know About Translytical Task Flows by Nimble Learn 
• Autonomous Finance: How Agentic AI and Fabric Will Reshape CFO Strategy by Data Driven AI 
• From ELT to Effortless: Building a Microsoft Fabric Medallion Architecture Without Code by Cloud Direct 
• Microsoft Fabric Databases – Unifying Transactions and Analytics for the Modern Data Estate by Cloud Services 
• Understanding from the CIO’s Point of View an Analysis of Governance and Security in Microsoft Fabric by Celebal Technologies Pvt Ltd. 

The post What’s new in OneLake and the Fabric platform: more sources, security, and capacity tooling appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

For nearly a decade, Microsoft and Databricks have closely partnered with the goal of empowering organizations to unlock the value of their data. Together, we’ve delivered solutions that combine the flexibility of the lakehouse architecture with the scale and security of Azure. Today, we’re taking that collaboration even further by deepening integration between Azure Databricks and Microsoft OneLake.

Delivering on the promise of an open data lakehouse

The current pace of technological innovation requires data estates to be more flexible than ever before. Seamless interoperability between platforms is no longer an ideal goal but a technical imperative. Organizations need the freedom to choose the right tools for their data project without worrying about data silos or complex integrations. That’s why Databricks pioneered the open lakehouse architecture, and why Microsoft built OneLake—an open data lake designed to serve as the foundation for data and AI.

Together, we’re making this vision real:

• Mirroring data into OneLake – already generally available
  Earlier this year we released Azure Databricks mirroring. Customers can already mirror Databricks data into OneLake through Unity Catalog. ensuring that all data—including the highest performance tables managed by Azure Databricks—are instantly available across Microsoft Fabric workloads. Both platforms can work over the same copy of data stored in Delta Lake format with no data movement.
• Reading data from OneLake – coming by year-end
  While Databricks managed data is available in OneLake, reading OneLake data from Databricks will soon be enabled with the recent OneLake catalog API. By the end of 2025, Azure Databricks will enable native reading from OneLake through Unity Catalog in preview, allowing users to seamlessly access data stored in OneLake without duplication or complex pipelines. Data can come from any Fabric workload. This means faster analytics and lower costs.

Writing and storing data natively in OneLake – on the horizon

Looking ahead, Azure Databricks will support writing and storing data directly in OneLake, without any additional storage resources to manage. This will deliver additional simplicity and interoperability for customers building on the lakehouse architecture. We’ll share timelines for this capability at FabCon in March 2026.

Why this matters for customers

These new integrations go beyond technical progress—they underscore our shared commitment to openness, flexibility, and empowering customers with choice. Together, Microsoft and Databricks are helping organizations unlock more value from their data with a seamless, unified foundation across both platforms.

With these integrations, customers can:

• Choose the right engine and tool for the job at hand: Gain full flexibility to pick the engine, tool, or platform you want for every task—based on your goals, workloads, or team expertise—without compromise.
• Bring data directly into your productivity apps: The OneLake catalog is now woven into Microsoft 365 experiences such as Teams, Excel, and Copilot Studio. This means business users can easily discover, access, and apply insights right where they work. For example, Teams users can enrich chats, channels, and meetings with data-driven context, with any data governed by OneLake or Unity Catalog.
• Scale resources efficiently and focus on innovation: With a single, shared copy of data across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks, you can eliminate costly duplication, streamline governance, and redirect time and investment toward innovation instead of data movement.
• Deliver richer AI and analytics outcomes: Whether you’re building copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio and AI Foundry, building Agents in Azure Databricks, or visualizing data in Power BI, you can unify and integrate data across Azure Databricks and Microsoft solutions—without ever moving it. Likewise, data in OneLake can seamlessly flow into Azure Databricks to power advanced AI, analytics, and data-sharing scenarios.

A shared commitment to innovation

Our collaboration is built on trust and a shared belief that openness drives innovation. By bringing Azure Databricks and OneLake closer together, we’re giving customers the freedom to build modern data architectures without compromise.

We’re excited about what’s next—and we’re just getting started.

The post Microsoft and Databricks: Advancing Openness and Interoperability with OneLake appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

That’s why Microsoft and Snowflake have been working side by side to make open, cross-platform integration effortless. Over the past 18 months, our collaboration has focused on one shared goal: helping customers connect Snowflake and Microsoft OneLake to access, analyze, and share data without duplication or complexity.

Built on open standards like Apache Iceberg and Parquet, this collaboration lets organizations use a single copy of data across both platforms and choose the right tool for every task. The result is a more flexible, efficient, and unified data experience—no matter where your data originates.

To learn more about how this interoperability works, check out our recent Microsoft and Snowflake: Delivering on the promise of openness and interoperability blog post.

Microsoft Ignite: Announcing enhanced interoperability between Microsoft and Snowflake

We’re excited to share new advancements that make the Microsoft–Snowflake integration even easier to use and more powerful.

We’ve added new, intuitive user interface (UI) experiences in both platforms to simplify setup and use. OneLake is adding a Snowflake-branded item in preview, allowing users to seamlessly access all Snowflake data within Microsoft Fabric without requiring further configuration. This means you can use any Fabric workload—analytics, AI, or visualization—directly on Snowflake data, without extra configuration.

Snowflake is also introducing new UI capabilities designed to let OneLake serve as the native storage location for your Snowflake data. This means all of your data can reside in OneLake, while taking advantage of Snowflake’s powerful engines.

Take a look at this new UI in action below and get started today.

How does this add to Microsoft’s existing interoperability?

We’ve already been able to deliver bidirectional data sharing between Snowflake and OneLake, for seamless interoperability between our platforms without data duplication. Customers can already write Snowflake tables directly to OneLake, access Apache Iceberg tables using OneLake shortcuts, and read OneLake tables from Snowflake—all without duplication or complex setup.

What we’ve already delivered:

• General Availability
  • Automatic translation of Iceberg metadata to Delta Lake metadata for use with all Microsoft Fabric engines.
  • Shortcut Snowflake Iceberg data (in Azure, Amazon S3, or GCS) directly into OneLake.
• Preview
  • Native storage of Snowflake Iceberg data in OneLake.
  • Automatic conversion of Fabric data into Iceberg format for seamless use in Snowflake.
  • New OneLake table APIs that work with Snowflake’s catalog-linked database feature.

And with the new UI now rolling out, we are making the existing interoperability easier to implement for your teams.

Looking ahead to unified, cross-platform data access and management

Looking ahead to 2026, our goal is to make all these capabilities generally available, so that even your most mission-critical workloads can take advantage of unified, cross-platform data access and management.

But beyond our existing interoperability, we are committed to continue removing barriers between our platforms, so you have full optionality for your data projects.

Still have questions about the integration?

Watch the recent Ask me Anything: Fabric and Snowflake Interoperability webinar where experts from Microsoft OneLake and Snowflake answered top questions on how to most effectively use these platforms together.

The post Microsoft and Snowflake: Simplified interoperability with no data movement appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

As our second annual event, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference brought more than 4,000 attendees to a sold-out event in Vienna. The week opened with a partner pre-day, followed by an executive track that gave senior leaders exclusive access to Microsoft leadership. On the main stage, our keynotes set the tone with the latest Fabric announcements that drew coverage across InfoWorld, SiliconANGLE, TechTarget, The Register, VentureBeat, The Neuron, and Le Monde.

With 130+ sessions, 11 full-day workshops, a vibrant community lounge, and dozens of expert-led booths, FabCon Vienna gave customers and partners the chance to learn, connect, and see how Fabric is transforming organizations worldwide. The event highlighted innovations, partnerships, and customer success shaping the future of data and AI. Let’s take a look at some of the best moments.

Day 1 keynote

The conference kicked off with a big welcome from Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data as well as a video welcome from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Arun and Satya highlighted the incredible customer momentum Fabric is experiencing, capped by appearances from Christian Meyers, Head of Platforms for Siemens AG and Gijs Thieme, Chief Data and Analytics Officer for KPN. This was followed by an action-packed segment led by Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft Fabric where he and the product team unveiled the latest innovations coming to Microsoft Fabric.

Highlights included our new OneLake enhancements with Oracle and Google BigQuery mirroring (preview), Graph and Maps in Fabric (preview) to unlock connected and geospatial insights, and expanded developer tooling with the Fabric Extensibility Toolkit, Model Context Protocol, and deeper Git/VS Code integration. Furthermore, we shared announcements related to the latest enterprise-grade advancements in Fabric security such as Azure Private Link, customer-managed keys, and Synapse migration capabilities, plus new partner solutions from ESRI, Lumel, and Neo4j.

For a deeper dive into these announcements, watch the full Microsoft Fabric keynote or read FabCon Vienna: Build data-rich agents on an enterprise-ready foundation.

Day 2 keynote

Day two expanded the spotlight to the Fabric ecosystem, with senior Microsoft leaders showing how Fabric unifies databases, governance, and AI to help organizations on their journey to become AI Frontier Firms. Jessica Hawk opened the session by introducing the Frontier Firm framework and why every organization should consider its roadmap to becoming one. Shireesh Thota followed with a vision for how databases powering modern AI apps must offer the deployment flexibility of both PaaS and SaaS to meet the exploding demand for data.

Kim Manis then demonstrated how Fabric’s deeply integrated governance, security, and compliance stack, from the data center to M365, enables organizations to confidently manage and secure data access. Closing out the keynote portion, Marco Casalaina showcased how Azure AI services deliver real-time capabilities like translations and how Azure AI Foundry integrates with Fabric to bring data-specific skills to customer AI agents and enable low-code agents built in Copilot Studio.

FabCon TV

We were thrilled to introduce FabCon TV to the programming for the first time at FabCon Vienna. This new platform brought expert-led content live to a studio audience, with all segments recorded to share with our global community in the months ahead. Many of the Fabric Tech Talk Fridays (F2T2) episodes were also filmed on the FabCon TV stage, giving the community a unique opportunity to experience their favorite weekly series live.

Whether you want to relive FabCon highlights or catch up on F2T2 deep dives, FabCon TV will be the hub for ongoing learning and inspiration.

FabCon Community Lounge

The Community Lounge was once again a hub of connection and learning, bringing together MVPs, Super Users, and User Group Leaders for meetups, Q&A sessions, and community-led discussions. Attendees enjoyed interactive experiences like the “Fast at Fabric” challenge, sticker scavenger hunts, and a collaborative coloring wall, all designed to spark participation while promoting skilling and certification opportunities.

Swag was earned through intentional activities such as joining user groups or subscribing to community blogs, making engagement both fun and rewarding. The lounge also hosted a Diversity & Inclusion lunch, highlighted Microsoft Learn certifications, and featured live MVP sessions and giveaways, reinforcing its role as a central space for skilling, networking, and community growth. Keep the momentum going by joining the Fabric Community.

To celebrate FabCon Vienna, we’re offering all community members a 50% discount on exams DP-600, DP-700, DP-900, and PL-300. Request your voucher before October 3!

Additional highlights from FabCon Vienna 2025

Beyond the keynotes and sessions, FabCon Vienna 2025 delivered memorable moments that blended innovation with community spirit, including:

• Hands-on exploration with unique experiences like a high-octane racing simulator powered by Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and expert-staffed booths for direct Q&A.
• Community competitions and creativity were highlighted by the DataViz World Championship, where data storytellers competed for the crown.
• A milestone celebration marking the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Power BI, honoring a decade of impact and innovation in analytics.
• Unparalleled connections with Microsoft product leaders, MVPs, partners, and peers, strengthening relationships across the global Fabric community.
• An exclusive, sold-out executive track offered senior leaders direct access to Microsoft executives, curated sessions, and peer-to-peer learning, capped by a memorable evening at a historic Viennese palace.
• Power Hour delivered fun and creativity with live Fabric and Azure demos, the crowd-favorite Fabric Family Feud (Engineering vs. Marketing), and limited-edition Lego Power BI birthday sets, cementing it as a must-see FabCon tradition.

Join us at FabCon Atlanta and Microsoft Ignite

Mark your calendars! The next FabCon is coming to my hometown in Atlanta, Georgia, from March 16 to 20, 2026. I’m thrilled to see the Fabric community come together here for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, and the networking that makes FabCon so special. Register today and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current early access pricing!

In the meantime, join us at Microsoft Ignite 2025. From November 18 to 21, 2025, experience the latest innovations across Microsoft Fabric and the full Microsoft Cloud live from San Francisco, the iconic hub of technology and culture, or join us online. We look forward to seeing you there.

And don’t stop there—hack the future of data and AI with Fabric. Compete in the Microsoft Fabric FabCon Global Hackathon for your chance to win up to $10,000! Running through November 3.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

• Register for FabCon Atlanta.
• Sign up for the Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap.
• Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator.
• Visit the Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.

The post FabCon Europe: Highlights from the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Welcome everyone to the second annual European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference this week in the vibrant city of Vienna, Austria! With more than 130 sessions and 10 full-day workshops, this year’s sold-out European event is bigger than ever and there’s no shortage of incredible learning experiences. More than 4,200 attendees will get to test their driving skills on a high-octane racing simulator powered by Fabric Real Time Intelligence, ask their questions directly at expert-staffed booths, compete for a chance to be crowned the DataViz World Champion, and celebrate Microsoft Power BI’s tenth anniversary.

This event is an opportunity to get much deeper into Microsoft Fabric, which has now become the fastest growing data platform in Microsoft’s history.¹ In less than two years, we’ve been able to expand Microsoft Fabric into a complete data and analytics platform with more than 25,000 customers, including about 80% of the Fortune 500, spanning everything from analytics to databases to real-time insights.

Microsoft has massive investments in Fabric, and I’m thrilled to share a new slate of announcements that will further advance Fabric’s vision as the most comprehensive, enterprise-grade data platform on the planet. These announcements include new OneLake shortcut and mirroring sources, a brand-new Graph database enabling you to connect entities across OneLake, new geospatial capabilities with Maps in Fabric, improved developer experiences, and new security controls—giving you what you need to run your mission-critical scenarios on Fabric.

Unify your data with OneLake, the AI-ready data foundation

Any successful AI or data project starts with the right data foundation. Organizations like Lumen, IFS, NTT Data, and the Chalhoub Group have all adopted Microsoft OneLake as the unified access point for their data. Lumen—a leader in enterprise connectivity—cut 10,000 hours of manual effort with OneLake. “We used to spend up to six hours a day copying data into SQL servers,” says Chad Hollingsworth, Cloud Architect at Lumen. “Now it’s all streamlined. OneLake allowed us to ingest once and use anywhere.”

With mirroring and OneLake shortcuts, we’ve simplified how you connect to and transform your data with a zero-copy, zero-ETL approach that allows you to instantly connect to any data—no matter the cloud, database, vendor, engine, or format. In addition to the recent announcement of mirroring for Azure Databricks, we are thrilled to announce the preview of mirroring for Oracle and Google BigQuery, allowing you to access your Oracle and Google data in OneLake in near real-time. We are also extending Fabric data agents to support all mirrored databases, so you can ask questions about your external database data. Additionally, we are announcing the general availability of OneLake shortcuts to Azure Blob Storage and the preview of new OneLake shortcut transformations to automatically convert JSON and Parquet files to Delta tables, for instant analysis. Finally, we are releasing the OneLake integration with Azure AI Search into general availability, enabling you to easily ground your custom agents with OneLake data.

With your data in OneLake, the OneLake catalog then provides the tools to discover, govern, and secure your data from a single place. With more than 30 million monthly active Power BI and Fabric users, it’s already the default source of data and insights. We are also launching OneLake security into full preview and creating a new tab in the OneLake catalog called Secure, where you can manage the security and permissions for all your data items. Along with this new tab, we are releasing OneLake catalog Govern tab into general availability.

We are also excited to enrich our extensibility story with the preview of a new OneLake Table API, which lets apps use GET and LIST calls to discover and inspect OneLake tables stored in either Iceberg or Delta format using Fabric’s security model. Finally, for workspace owners, we are releasing preview of OneLake diagnostics that allows you to capture all the data activity and storage operations for a specific workspace into any lakehouse in the same capacity.

Train smarter agents with connected intelligence from graph and maps in Fabric

The first step in starting any agentic project is data. You need to bring the data together and ensure your data estate can handle the volume of data used in training. But sophisticated AI agents require more than simply huge quantities of data. To provide you with accurate answers grounded on your business, they need to first understand the relationships between data. They need to understand your business operations. They need context.

We believe this is the next major shift now required for a modern AI-ready data estate. You can learn more about this shift and our vision in Jessica Hawk’s blog, “Microsoft leads shift beyond data unification to organization, delivering next gen AI readiness.” To help you provide this context to your agents or any other data project, we are excited to announce the preview of two transformative new features in Fabric: Graph and Maps.

Model, analyze, and visualize complex data relationships

Graph in Fabric is designed to enable organizations to visualize and query relationships that drive business outcomes. Built upon the proven architecture principles of LinkedIn’s graph technology, graph in Fabric can help you reveal connections across customers, partners, and supply chains. But like your data, graph in Fabric is easier to explain visually.

Graph in Microsoft Fabric is a game changer. The highly scalable graph engine coupled with Fabric’s ease of use is a uniquely powerful combination.

—Luke Hiester, Senior Data Scientist, Eastman Chemical Company

Graph will roll out in various Fabric regions starting on October 1, 2025.

Visualize, analyze, and act on location-based data instantly

Maps in Fabric can help you bring geospatial context to your agents and operations by transforming enormous volumes of location-based data into interactive, real-time visualizations that drive location-aware decisions and enhance business awareness. Check out a full demo of the new Maps in Fabric experience.

By combining streaming analytics, geospatial mapping, and contextual modeling, maps can help you extract location-based insights for your existing business processes to drive better awareness and outcomes.

You can learn more about graph and maps in Yitzhak Kesselman’s “The Foundation for Powering AI-Driven Operations: Fabric Real-Time Intelligence” blog.

Delighting developers with new tools in Fabric

Power BI is a leader in business intelligence for developers with more than 7 million actively building data visuals. Now, Microsoft Fabric is quickly becoming the home for all data developers. To help developers feel even more at home, we’re adding a huge range of new tooling across Fabric.

First, we’ve released the Fabric Extensibility Toolkit into preview—an evolution of the Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit but newly designed to help any developer bring their data apps to Fabric for their own organizations along with a simplified architecture and additional automation to drastically streamline development. Developers can now simply build their own Fabric items, and everything else like distribution, user interface, and security is taken care of for you—try it today.

We’re also introducing the preview of Fabric MCP, a developer-focused Model Context Protocol that enables AI-assisted code generation and item authoring in Microsoft Fabric. Designed for agent-powered development and automation, it streamlines how you build using Fabric’s public APIs with built-in templates and best-practice instructions. It also integrates with tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces and is fully open and extensible.

With the general availability of Git integration and deployment pipelines with lakehouses, data warehouses, copy jobs, activator, Power BI reports, and many more, we are excited to announce that you can employ continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities across the Fabric platform. We are even extending CI/CD support to Fabric data agents. We are also releasing User Data Functions and the Fabric VS Code extension into general availability. And we are releasing an open-source version of the command line interface in Fabric.

Finally, we are also releasing horizontal tabs for open items, support for multiple active workspaces, and a new object explorer—all designed to make multitasking in Fabric smoother, faster, and more intuitive.

Build your mission-critical scenarios on Microsoft Fabric

Fabric has comprehensive, built-in tools for network security, data security, and governance, enabling any organization to effectively manage and govern their data. A detailed overview of all of the existing capabilities are available in the Fabric Security Whitepaper.

Now, we are thrilled to announce significant additions to our security, capacity management, performance, and migration—all of which further cement Fabric as the ideal data platform for every AI and mission-critical scenario. Frontier firms implementing AI need more than just next-generation AI tools. You need a comprehensive, cost-effective data platform to support your projects with end-to-end data protection, integration with developer tools, and performance that can scale to any need. Microsoft Fabric has both the leading generative AI capabilities and the enterprise-ready foundation to truly foster an AI-powered data culture.

Connect securely to even the most sensitive data

First, we are providing additional safeguards to help you manage secure data connections and precisely manage the level of isolation you need in each workspace. We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Private Link in Fabric and outbound access protection for Spark, and the soon to be released preview of workspace IP filtering—all at the workspace-level. Additionally, we are expanding mirroring to support on-premises data sources and data sources behind firewalls. Finally, we are excited to announce the general availability of customer managed keys for Fabric workspaces coming next month.

More granular capacity management

Gaining control over the jobs running on your Fabric capacities is critical to any mission critical scenario. To give you this control, we are announcing the general availability of surge protection for background jobs and the preview of surge protection for workspaces. With surge protection, you can set limits on background activity consumption and now, specific workspace activity—helping you protect capacities from unexpected surges.

Enhanced Fabric Data Warehouse performance

Fabric is engineered to handle massive data volumes with exceptional performance across its analytics engines, and we’re continuously enhancing their efficiency. Since August 2024, we’ve released 40 performance improvements to Fabric Data Warehouse driven by your feedback, resulting in a 36% performance improvement in industry standard benchmarks—try Fabric Data Warehouse today.

Seamlessly migrate your Synapse data to Fabric

We are also excited to release the general availability of an end-to-end migration experience natively built into Fabric, enabling Azure Synapse Analytics (data warehouse) customers to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Fabric. The migration experience allows you to migrate both metadata and data from Synapse Analytics and comes with an intelligent assessment, guided support, and AI-powered assistance to minimize the migration effort.

Extend Fabric with partner-created workloads and seamless integration with Snowflake

We are excited to announce the general availability of new partner solutions native to Microsoft Fabric from ESRI, Lumel, and Neo4j. ESRI’s advanced geospatial analytics, Lumel’s vibrant business intelligence insights, and Neo4j’s graph analytics are all just a click away in the Fabric workload hub. In addition, several new partners are announcing capabilities built on Microsoft Fabric, learn more by reading the FabCon Vienna partner blog.

In May of 2024, we announced an expanded partnership with Snowflake—committing both our platforms to provide seamless bi-directional integration and enable customers with the flexibility to do what makes sense for their business. Since then, we’ve expanded interoperability between Snowflake and Microsoft OneLake including the ability to write Snowflake tables to OneLake, the ability to use OneLake shortcuts to access Snowflake tables, the ability to read OneLake tables directly from Snowflake, and full support for Apache Iceberg format in OneLake. Now, we are releasing new Iceberg REST Catalog APIs that allow Snowflake to read Iceberg tables from OneLake, keeping OneLake tables automatically in sync. You can learn more about this new announcement and our partnership by reading the Microsoft OneLake and Snowflake interoperability blog.

See more Microsoft Fabric innovation

In addition to the announcements above, we are excited to share a huge slate of other innovations coming to Fabric, including enhancements to SQL databases in Fabric, the preview of Runtime 2.0, the preview of AI functions in Data Wrangler, the general availability of editing semantic models in the Power BI service, and so much more.

You can learn more about these announcements and everything else by reading the Fabric September 2025 Feature summary blog, the Power BI September feature summary blog, or by exploring the latest blogs on the Fabric Updates channel.

Join us at FabCon Atlanta and Microsoft Ignite

Already excited about the next FabCon? Join us in Atlanta, Georgia, from March 16 to 20, 2026, for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, community networking, and everything else you love about FabCon. Register for FabCon today and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current Early Access pricing!

In the meantime, you can join us at Microsoft Ignite this year from November 18 to 21, 2025, either in person in San Francisco or online to see even more innovation coming to Fabric and the rest of Microsoft. You’ll see firsthand the latest solutions and capabilities across all of Microsoft and connect with experts who can help you bolster your knowledge, build connections, and explore emerging technologies.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap.
• Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator.
• Visit the Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.

Sign up now for our upcoming ask the Fabric expert sessions

• Join us on September 24, 2025, for the “Ask the Experts—Microsoft OneLake” webinar where experts from our OneLake team will join to answer all your questions live.

Get certified in Microsoft Fabric

• Join the thousands of other Fabric users who’ve achieved more than 50,000 certifications collectively for the Fabric Analytics Engineers and Fabric Data Engineers roles. To celebrate FabCon Vienna, we are offering the entire Fabric community a 50% discount on exams DP-600, DP-700, DP-900, and PL-300. Request your voucher.

Join the FabCon Global Hackathon

• Build real-world data and AI solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible with Microsoft Fabric. Join the hackathon to compete for prizes up to $10,000.

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners

• How AI-native data platforms are redefining business by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
• Your Operational Data Just Became Your Smartest Business Agent by iLink Digital.
• From OLTP to AI: Choosing Your Microsoft Fabric Database Engine by Lumel Technologies.
• Building scalable e-commerce product recommendations with Microsoft Fabric SQL by MAQ Software.
• Things You Should Know About MCP in Microsoft Fabric by Nimble Learn.
• How to Estimate Microsoft Fabric Costs: Capacity Planning Strategies for AI Workloads by JourneyTeam.
• How Microsoft Fabric Modernized & Transformed ERP Data Analytics by Bizmetric.
• Unlocking the full value of Data as a Product with Microsoft Fabric and Purview by Thoughtworks.

¹Microsoft FY25 Q4 earnings report

The post FabCon Vienna: Build data-rich agents on an enterprise-ready foundation appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

This blog post is co-authored by Christian Kleinerman, Executive VP of Product, Snowflake.

The typical organization’s data estate now includes hundreds of specialized and often disconnected applications—all of which generate data that you need to understand. To capture and analyze this data, each department and team has their own data and AI service that meets their specific needs, whether that be ease-of-use, familiarity, or specialized functionality. Interoperability between not only the applications, but the data platforms themselves, is no longer a technical aspiration but a necessity for most businesses.

Microsoft and Snowflake announced a shared vision one year ago with this in mind: simplify interoperability, reduce data movement, and accelerate insights by enabling seamless data access between Snowflake and Microsoft OneLake—our single, unified SaaS data lake—to enable mutual customers to more easily access all their data. This vision is anchored in open standards like Apache Iceberg and Parquet, allowing customers to use one copy of data across platforms and choose the right tool for the job at hand. This approach can help our customers do what makes the most sense for their business without creating data silos or duplicating data.

Today, we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made to expand interoperability including what’s available now, what’s in preview, and what’s coming next.

How interoperability works

Snowflake and Microsoft OneLake interoperate through open standards. Snowflake supports Apache Iceberg tables stored in OneLake, so you can create and manage Iceberg tables in OneLake and access them from both Snowflake and Fabric engines without moving or duplicating data. It also means you only need to load the data into the lake once, and all the engines can operate on the same copy of data. This single copy approach means teams can collaborate on a single source of truth rather than fragmenting information across data platforms.

OneLake uses open formats (Parquet, Delta, Iceberg) and exposes standard endpoints, which means your existing tools and SDKs work without custom connectors. This ensures that data remains in OneLake while being accessible by multiple engines, giving you one copy of data for analytics, AI, and BI. While most Fabric engines store their data using the delta lake format and Snowflake uses Iceberg, this is not a problem. Microsoft OneLake seamlessly provides both metadata formats automatically so that all data can work in any platform.

What’s available (GA and preview)

OneLake supports Iceberg, and Snowflake supports OneLake. With many items now going into general availability, you can access this bi-directional data support, enabling seamless interoperability without data duplication.

We are excited to announce the following features are moving into either preview or general availability in the next few weeks:

• General availability: Automatic translation of Iceberg metadata to Delta Lake metadata for use with all Fabric engines.
• General availability: Shortcut Snowflake Iceberg data stored in Azure, Amazon S3, or GCS into your existing OneLake.
• Preview: Automatic translation of Fabric data to Iceberg format for easy use within Snowflake.
• Preview: New OneLake table APIs which seamlessly integrate with Snowflake’s catalog-linked database feature.

And finally, you can store Snowflake Iceberg data natively in OneLake, already available in preview.

Coming soon

• Deeper experience integrations designed to make setup and collaboration between the Fabric and Snowflake services even easier.

One copy across platforms—why this matters

The ability to use a single copy of your data across both Snowflake and Fabric enables several compelling use cases:

• Build an open lakehouse on your terms: Pick the right engine and tool across either platform depending on the task at hand, your skillset, or your needs.
• Turn Microsoft 365 into hubs for discovering and applying insights: With the OneLake catalog embedded in hundreds of the most widely used apps like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can help all your business users discover and use data. For example, your Teams users can infuse data into their everyday work with embedded channels, chat, and meeting experiences. And security defined in OneLake travels with the data so you can ensure business users only access what they should.
• More efficiently scale team resources and shift from data movement to drive innovation: With a single copy of data across Snowflake and Fabric, you can spend less time organizing and governing your data estate, reduce the costs of duplicating data across various locations, and dedicate more time to discovering insights.
• Deliver high fidelity AI and analytics data products by unifying your data: Whether you’re building an agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio or curating a Power BI dashboard, you can integrate your data in Snowflake with your Microsoft solutions to enrich your results without any data movement. Likewise, data stored in OneLake can be extended to Snowflake to build AI apps or more easily share data, among many other workloads.
• Build a single, connected and governed view of your open lakehouse: Integrate OneLake via Iceberg REST APIs to Snowflake using Catalog Linked Databases to securely centralize and access all your Iceberg tables from a single governed pane of glass.

Get started building with Snowflake and Fabric

• Request an exploration call or join the latest private preview of Iceberg Table Virtualization by signing up.
• Try the Snowflake Quickstart for Iceberg in OneLake.
• Read the original partnership blog for architecture details.
• Explore our OneLake developer guidance for endpoints and SDKs.
• Learn how to build data-rich agents at FabCon Vienna 2025.

The post Microsoft and Snowflake: Delivering on the promise of openness and interoperability appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Now, we’re sharing additional learnings—from our efforts and those of our global ecosystem of partners and customers, and from the advice we’ve received from external sustainability experts—in the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation. The guide offers practical tips to help business leaders consider what steps can help their organizations build a culture and infrastructure around ESG data, and provides context for taking the Microsoft ESG Data Readiness Assessment.

For quick examples of industry-specific considerations addressed in the guide, see the chart below.

ESG Data Readiness Assessment

<a href="https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-esg-data-readiness-assessment.html?lcid=en-us">Take the assessment </a>

Leveraging the Leader’s Guide

When we began our own sustainability journey, we learned that to make progress on our ESG goals we had to bring sustainability out of siloed reporting efforts and into the core of our business. The Leader’s Guide discusses approaches to this operational shift, including ways to facilitate cross-functional conversations within your organization around the value of harnessing ESG data.

The guide also shows how Microsoft customers in different industries are using sustainability solutions to transform their operations. For example, international forestry group Södra had been limited to a labor-intensive process—siloed within its sustainability unit—to answer routine inquiries about its environmental data. Since collaborating to adopt Microsoft Sustainability Manager in 2023, Södra’s IT and sustainability teams have been generating significant insights for stakeholders, including the organization’s estimate that its positive climate impact is equal to about one-fifth of Sweden’s reported carbon dioxide emissions.

We’re ready to partner with your organization so you can also use ESG data to uncover operational insights to support your sustainability progress.

How ESG data supports business resilience

As organizations worldwide try to predict and prepare for emerging ESG disclosure requirements, they also need to respond to expanding market expectations. Investors, consumers, and shareholders are tracking companies’ sustainability commitments, and they’re looking for products and solutions that champion those commitments.

Our customer King Steel, a Taiwan-based global shoe manufacturer, faced this situation when major brands like Nike and Adidas began expecting sustainable and recyclable products. To align with its customers, King Steel started collecting and digitizing its ESG data using Dynamics 365 and capabilities within Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. This shift to a digitized data estate not only enabled King Steel to deliver transparent data to demanding customers, it also helped the company uncover insights into materials and operations that resulted in more sustainable production, reduction of waste, and innovation of new customizable products.

By implementing a robust ESG data infrastructure, your organization can also respond to sustainability-driven market demands with speed and insights.

From commitments to solutions

Early in our journey, we quickly realized our environmental commitments necessitated better tools to manage the increasing number, size, and complexity of our ESG datasets. We also needed to unify siloed data and ensure traceability and transparency—to execute our plan to publicly self-disclose our ESG progress, and to prepare for the evolution of sustainability reporting requirements. Simultaneously, we wanted to use our ESG data to identify opportunities to drive sustainability efficiencies and business growth.

This led us to Microsoft Fabric and AI tools built on Microsoft Azure. By adopting these capabilities, we’ve now integrated our ESG, operational, and financial data, empowering our employees to access timely data intelligence so they can contribute ideas and innovate.

But to meet our ambitious sustainability commitments, we must also drive change across our value chain. In 2023, we estimated that 75% or more of our carbon footprint was coming from indirect, or Scope 3 emissions, which organizations accrue from suppliers. To address this, the Microsoft Procurement team needed customized ESG inquiries, granular data, and flexible, collaborative reporting. The team partnered with Microsoft engineers to add new capabilities to our data technologies, including low-code customization and self-service features to help our value-chain partners find ways to reduce their environmental impact.

Then we carried these robust solutions forward to our customers, so organizations like US farming powerhouse Land O’Lakes can access their ESG data for day-to-day decision-making. For example, the company relies on Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to collect and unify data on weather, soil, and irrigation—freeing Land O’Lakes data scientists to help optimize planting decisions. The Azure-based ESG data infrastructure also boosts the Land O’Lakes competitive stance by providing consumers with visibility into the organization’s farming practices and environmental outcomes.

Exploring industry-specific considerations

With the right tools, ESG data can support each industry’s unique set of goals, challenges, and opportunities.

Here’s a look at some of the issues our Leader’s Guide and ESG Assessment can help you start exploring:

• Visit the Leader’s Guide for in-depth information and resources.

Next steps

As you rethink operations to support your organization’s sustainability progress, we’re ready to share our learnings and continuous innovation to help advance your ESG priorities, accelerate your growth, and partner for a shared sustainable future.

The post Driving business value with ESG data readiness appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Learn more about how Microsoft is enhancing healthcare with data and responsible AI. Read the latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announcements.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to ingest, store, and analyze healthcare-related data from various sources and modalities into one unified data store for analytics and AI. Also, the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview, an innovative suite of features designed to help you govern your healthcare data with confidence, is now available in public preview. With these advancements, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare now offers an expanded bundle of general availability services to further empower healthcare organizations in their digital transformation journey.

EPAM, renowned for supporting Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare clients with advanced technical solutions, has experienced substantial benefits from leveraging healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. These advantages manifest as heightened customer satisfaction, notable cost savings, and accelerated project timelines. The solution’s impact is particularly noteworthy as it provides healthcare clients with reliable, AI-ready data in an efficient manner.  

“For a recent AI and Advanced Analytics Solutions, our projections estimated a significant investment to develop the necessary data products for the analytics needs, with a substantial portion dedicated to establishing the data foundation. However, with the launch of this solution and a successful pilot, we were able to revise the project scope significantly. This resulted in more than 40% reduction in implementation time and costs, highlighting the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the solution.” 
—Brian Blanchard, Cloud Chief Technology Officer, EPAM

Unify your multi-modal healthcare data for analytics and AI with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric represents a significant leap in the journey towards data-centric healthcare. This all-encompassing platform streamlines the integration, preservation, and examination of diverse biomedical data, bridging the gaps between isolated data repositories and fostering powerful analytical insights. 

Microsoft FabricTry free 

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables healthcare organizations to ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities. These data solutions provide a set of capabilities that enable a multi-modal biomedical lakehouse, which can handle clinical, imaging, claims, conversational, and social determinants of health (SDOH) data. It adheres to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standards, introduces data transformations, and ensures a secure, regulatory-compliant framework for managing data. 

By using healthcare data solutions, you can benefit from the following features:  

• A unified data model that supports industry standards such as FHIR and DICOM. 
• A rich set of data transformation and enrichment tools that prepare your data for analysis, as well as add clinical and demographic annotations.  
• A suite of data visualization and cohorting experiences, that can help you discover patterns, trends, and outliers in your data, as well as create dashboards and reports.  
• A secure and compliant environment that aims to meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements, with role-based access control, data governance, and data lineage.  

Additionally, we are pleased to announce the public preview of additional functionality that enhances the existing capabilities within our healthcare data solutions offering. These include: 

• Conversational Data Integration: Enable customers to send their conversational data, such as patient conversations from DAX Copilot to Fabric. By sending DAX audio files, transcripts, and draft clinical notes to Fabric, customers and partners can leverage various native tools in Azure and Fabric to analyze this data or combine it with other data to generate comprehensive insights. 
• Social determinants of health public datasets transformation: Ingest, persist, harmonize, and consume SDOH public datasets such as Location Affordability Index, Food Environment Atlas and Rural Atlas from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Environmental Justice Index, ACS Education Attainment, SDOH Dataset from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Australian Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), and United Kingdom Indices of Deprivation to enable healthcare organizations to identify risks and health-related social needs to create equitable health care for all patients and communities. 
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Claim and Claim Line Feed Files (CMS CCLF) claims data ingestion: Streamline the ingestion of CMS CCLF claims data and harmonize with clinical, imaging, and SDOH data to unlock actionable insights on patients and populations. Use this data to understand and manage healthcare costs, identify care gaps, and help health outcomes. 
• Care management analytics: Leverage unified healthcare data and care management analytical templates to enhance patient care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment plans, and improving care coordination and empower your organization to deliver personalized, efficient, and proactive care. 
• Data discovery and cohorting: An integrated workflow that allows you to create, manage, analyze, and share patient cohorts. Create cohorts using natural language and export cohorts into AI pipelines, notebooks, or downstream applications.

With healthcare data solutions, you can unlock the value of your data and enable data-driven healthcare. You can use your data to help improve patient outcomes, enhance population health, optimize operational efficiency, and accelerate research and innovation. You can also leverage the power of AI and machine learning to build predictive models, identify risk factors, and personalize interventions.  

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available in Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your healthcare services; start your free trial now.

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available

Learn how 

Protect your data with the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview 

Healthcare organizations need to govern their data with assured confidence—guaranteeing robust security and strict compliance. Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance service that helps you discover, catalog, and classify data across your data estate. The healthcare application templates for Microsoft Purview accelerates our customers journey by providing healthcare-specific classifications, glossaries for healthcare standards, and guidelines on how to use them together with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

“Healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview strengthens Microsoft’s commitment to support its clients in the healthcare industry. Here at Sentara we have been leveraging its glossaries and classifications to identify and tag our critical assets. We look forward to partnering with them on their journey continuous advancement in data governance.”
—Abdul Ghani Mohammed, IT Manager (Data Governance & Data Quality), Sentara Health 

Identify sensitive healthcare data with healthcare classifications 

One of the key challenges of governing healthcare data is identifying and protecting sensitive information, such as protected health information (PHI) or personal identifiable information (PII). Microsoft Purview addresses this challenge by providing a set of healthcare-specific classifications based on HIPAA privacy rules. These classifications cover important healthcare classifications such as date of admission, date of discharge, and more. You can also create custom classifications using regular expressions or keywords, allowing you to automatically discover and classify sensitive data across different data sources like Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. 

Understand your healthcare data with glossaries based on healthcare standards 

Healthcare data is often complex and diverse, coming from various sources and formats. To help you understand and manage your data, Microsoft Purview provides glossaries for healthcare standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). These glossaries contain definitions and metadata for common healthcare terms and concepts, improving data quality, consistency, and interoperability across your data estate. 

Test your governance solution with healthcare sample data 

Sample data is essential for evaluating, testing, and validating the custom healthcare classifications and glossaries. By providing a realistic and relevant healthcare dataset, customers can validate if the Purview healthcare application templates meet their organization’s needs without bringing in their own production or sample data. 

Protect your data in healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The healthcare application templates provided by Microsoft Purview facilitate the discovery, cataloging, and classification of data, thereby enhancing data quality, consistency, and interoperability across the healthcare data estate.  

Using these templates, you can enhance your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric with data governance capabilities that help protect your data. You can use Microsoft Purview to scan your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric data lake and catalog your data assets with classifications and glossaries. You can also use Microsoft Purview to monitor your data lineage, data quality, and data access across your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric pipelines and applications. By integrating Microsoft Purview with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, you can gain a holistic and trusted view of your healthcare data and leverage it for better insights and outcomes. This unified approach not only strengthens security but also ensures strict compliance, enabling healthcare organizations to govern their data with confidence.  

Learn more about how to get access to the public preview, and learn how you can use healthcare application templates to protect your data in the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping your organization shape a healthier future with data and AI 

We are excited to strengthen our data and AI investments through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry. 

Learn more about all of our solutions in healthcare: Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.

The post Power healthcare AI with unified and protected multi-modal healthcare data appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

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.

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