A Leader in Data Integration 

We feel that Microsoft’s acknowledgment in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reflects our dedication to innovation and customer-centric solutions. This stems from our relentless drive to advance technology and address the ever-evolving needs of modern organizations.

Our vision for data integration is to deliver seamless, intuitive experiences that empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data and achieve transformative results. This recognition reinforces our dedication to leading the evolution of data integration and delivering unparalleled value to our customers and partners worldwide.

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Microsoft Fabric: Unified Data Platform for the Era of AI 

At the core of our data integration strategy is Microsoft Fabric. Built to navigate the complexities of modern data ecosystems, Microsoft Fabric provides an all-in-one, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with AI-powered services to handle any data project—all within a pre-integrated and optimized environment. It enables organizations to unlock their data’s full potential, drive innovation, and make smarter decisions. Features like Copilot and other generative AI tools introduce new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft OneLake: The heart of our Data Integration journey 

At the center of our Fabric is OneLake, the unified, open data lake that simplifies and accelerates data integration across diverse systems. OneLake, with the data integration capabilities of Fabric, is designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication. 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. It acts as the central hub, ensuring seamless connectivity, accessibility, and collaboration for all your data needs. 

OneLake has four innovative pathways for integrating data depending on your needs: 

1. Fabric Data Factory 

Fabric Data Factory integrates seamlessly with OneLake, offering powerful cloud-scale services for data movement, orchestration, transformation, deployment, and monitoring. These capabilities enable organizations to tackle even the most complex ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) scenarios, unifying data estates, streamlining operations, and unlocking the full potential of their data.

2. Multi-Cloud Shortcuts

OneLake shortcuts allow you to virtualize data into OneLake from across clouds, accounts, and domains—all without duplication, movement, or changes to metadata or ownership. This capability allows organizations to access and analyze their data in place, without the need for complex data migration processes. By maintaining a live connection to the source, OneLake ensures real-time data availability and consistency across all integrated environments. You can shortcut data from Azure Data Lake Service, S3-compatible sources, Iceberg-compatible sources, Google Cloud Platform, Dataverse, and more.

3. Database Mirroring 

OneLake offers an innovative zero-ETL approach to database mirroring, simplifying the replication of operational databases into the lake. This capability minimizes the effort required to synchronize databases, supporting real-time changes and ensuring that data is always current and ready for analytics and reporting.

4. Real-Time Intelligence 

Real-time intelligence in Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to ingest and process streaming and high granularity data instantaneously, driving real-time insights and automating decision-making. This solution is ideal for applications requiring immediate data updates, such as IoT analytics, fraud detection, and operational dashboards. The capability extends to highly granular data analytics, allowing businesses to track a single package within a global delivery network or monitor a specific component in a manufacturing machine across a fleet of factories worldwide, enabling precise insights and optimized operations. Leveraging cutting-edge data processing frameworks, Eventhouse ensures scalability, reliability, and low-latency performance, making it suitable for high-volume streaming scenarios.

With these innovative pathways, Fabric empowers organizations to break down data silos, optimize workflows, and unlock the full potential of their data. Whether it’s through seamless data integration, real-time insights, or multi-cloud collaboration, Fabric is designed to meet the demands of modern data ecosystems. These enriched features position Fabric as a critical tool for organizations aiming to unlock the full potential of their data while maintaining simplicity, security, and scalability.

Customer success stories 

Our customers’ success stories are a testament to the impact of Microsoft Fabric. Organizations across various industries have leveraged our data integration capabilities to unlock new opportunities, drive innovation, and achieve their business goals. By streamlining data processes and improving data quality, Microsoft Fabric has enabled these businesses to make data-driven decisions with confidence. 

Read UST Global’s case study to learn how they leveraged the power of Fabric to migrate over 20 years of data, integrating disparate data sources to facilitate better collaboration and innovation among employees. 

Looking ahead: The future of Data Integration with Microsoft Fabric 

As we celebrate being recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the fourth consecutive year in a row, we are motivated to push the boundaries of what’s possible in data integration. To us, this is a milestone that reflects not only our commitment to innovation but also our dedication to empowering our customers to turn their data into actionable insights.

Looking forward, the roadmap for Microsoft Fabric is filled with exciting enhancements and new features. These advancements are designed to tackle the complexities of modern data ecosystems, making it even easier for organizations to unify, transform, and harness their data at scale. Continuous improvement is at the core of our strategy. We aim to remain at the forefront of the data integration landscape and redefine the possibilities of what a comprehensive data platform can achieve. 

We believe this recognition by Gartner is a validation of the trust our customers place in us and a reflection of our relentless drive to deliver world-class solutions. As we continue this journey, we remain committed to collaborating with our community and partners, building on this success to achieve even greater outcomes together.

Resources 

• Read the full complimentary report from Gartner. 
• Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  
• Data Factory Overview 
• Real Time Intelligence 
• Transforming Your Business With Real-Time Intelligence 
• Getting Started with Microsoft Fabric  
• What’s new and planned for Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  
• FAQ 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, By Thornton Craig, Sharat Menon, Robert Thanaraj, Michele Launi, Nina Showell, 3 December 2024 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. Available here.

The post Microsoft: A leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant report appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With Fabric, we focused on simplicity, openness, and autonomy. All Fabric workloads work together seamlessly out-of-the-box without the myriad of infrastructure and configuration settings you typically find in data platforms so you can focus on getting results. You can ingest structured and unstructured data in any format into OneLake’s open Delta Parquet format and even access third-party tools from industry leading software companies built directly into Fabric. Advanced security, governance, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are woven into the platform with personalized experiences for admins and users alike. Microsoft Copilot and other AI capabilities are built into every layer of Fabric to help data professionals and business users automate routine tasks and get more done. In fact, we’ve found that users were 52% faster in completing standard data analysis tasks and uncovered insights 36% more accurately when using Copilot in Fabric, with 90% saying they were likely to adopt Copilot in Fabric.¹  

Fabric’s vision for a data platform has highly resonated with the industry, and more than 17,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 500, are already using Fabric to empower their data teams.

• Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia, used Fabric to analyze their operational data in real-time and gained 30% increased performance efficiency across data-related operations. “It’s a radical and powerful new technology that can feel just like using Microsoft Excel or Power BI. But once in the hands of the user, it doesn’t feel like a new, complex technology at all,” Irfan Khan, Head of Data and Analytics.  
• Chanel, a world leader in luxury fashion, adopted Fabric not only to drive more value from its data and support their AI innovation, but also safeguard its data at rest and in-transit with Fabric’s end-to-end, built-in security, governance, and reliability. “We chose Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of this platform, driven by its ability to implement a data mesh approach,” Olivier Barbonnat, Chief Information Officer Europe.  
• Our own Microsoft IDEAS (insights, data, engineering, analytics, systems) team, one of the largest data teams in the world, transitioned to Fabric to support its AI ambitions. Its solution now encompasses 27,000 data sources, 420 petabytes of data, 35,000 data pipelines, 38,000 semantic models, and more than 600 teams relying on its models. The IDEAS team estimated it has received a 50% efficiency boost from consolidating assets in OneLake, using modern tools such as Spark and Python, Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Power BI, and AI-assisted coding through IDEAS Copilot.

Schaeffler, Hitachi Solutions, KPMG, Epic, and many other customers have seen a transformational impact to how they process data. You can explore all these Fabric stories on the Microsoft Customer Stories page. One of the reasons Fabric caught the imagination of so many is because, with Fabric, you can simplify and future-proof your data estate. Fabric’s capabilities and workloads will continue to expand and be seamlessly infused into our pre-integrated platform, helping you keep up with the technology trends without added work.  

And since launching Fabric, we’ve added new ways to bring data into Fabric with capabilities like mirroring and new shortcut sources. We’ve expanded Copilot in Fabric across almost every experience to help everyone automate routine tasks. We’ve added a multitude of security and governance features to help you make sure your data is secure at every step of its journey. We’ve added the ability to extend Fabric further with native, industry-specific workloads from Microsoft and other software developers. And most impactfully, we launched a new workload to help organizations make better decisions from Internet of Things (IoT), logs, and telemetry data—Real-Time Intelligence.  

With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, we transformed Fabric into a platform equipped to support your operational scenarios and data in motion. And now, we’re helping you bring transactional scenarios to Fabric with the introduction of Fabric Databases. 

Introducing a unified data platform with Fabric Databases

Currently, the data and AI technology market is massively fragmented with hundreds of vendors and thousands of services. We believe the future of data and AI is the convergence of all your data services into a unified, open, and extensible platform, so you no longer have to manually stitch together disconnected services.  

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major leap toward this goal with Fabric Databases, now in preview. Fabric Databases represent a new class of cloud databases that brings a world-class transactional database natively to Microsoft Fabric for app developers. With the addition of Fabric Databases, Fabric now brings together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform. Developers can streamline application development with simple, autonomous, and AI-optimized databases that provision in seconds and are secured by default with features like cloud authentication and database encryption. Built-in vector search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) support, and Azure AI integration simplify AI app development, and your data is instantly available in OneLake for advanced analytics. Developers can even use Copilot in Fabric to translate natural language queries into SQL and get inline code completion alongside code fixes and explanations.

SQL database, the first available in Fabric, was built on our industry-leading SQL Server engine and the simple and intuitive SaaS platform of Fabric. In fact, data professionals who’ve tried SQL database in Fabric were able to complete common database tasks up to 71% faster and with 63% more effective task completion. They reported feeling 84% more confident in these tasks and finding the tasks up to 91% less difficult.²  These results were even more pronounced for people who were newer to cloud. Those with less than two years of cloud platform experience benefited the most in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, highlighting the simplicity and intuitiveness of Fabric Databases. 

SQL database is just the beginning for Fabric Databases, with more databases on the roadmap. Whether you’re an experienced data professional or just getting started, you can build AI apps faster and more confidently on Fabric Databases.

To learn more, read the Fabric Databases blog post, watch the Microsoft Mechanics deep dive video, and watch the following sizzle video:

General availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

We’re also thrilled to announce Real-Time Intelligence is now generally available. With Real-Time Intelligence, you get both pro-dev and no-code tools to ingest high-volume streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger automated actions based on the data. The Real-time hub provides a central place to discover and manage all your streaming data. Dener Motorsport, a participant in the annual Porsche Carrera Cup Brasil event, used Real-Time Intelligence for in-race analytics, and their CEO, Dener Pires, said “Before we used Microsoft Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence, it was probably 30 minutes before the engineers knew that something was wrong with a car, could get the data, analyze it, and provide a solution. Today that process is done in minutes.” Check out this blog post and the following demo to see Real-Time Intelligence in action: 

OneLake catalog—a complete catalog for discovery, management, and governance

No matter what data project you’re trying to accomplish, it starts with the right foundation. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, is built for everyone in your entire organization as the single point to discover and explore your data. With OneLake shortcuts and mirroring, you can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources and enable your people to work from the same data—meaning fewer copies of data, better collaboration between your teams, and easier, more streamlined analysis. And since data is stored in an open format, you can use data in OneLake for all your data projects, no matter the vendor or service.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the OneLake catalog, a complete solution to explore, manage, and govern your entire Fabric data estate. The OneLake catalog comes with two tabs, Explore and Govern, that can help all Fabric users discover and manage trusted data, as well as provide governance for data owners with valuable insights, recommended actions, and tooling. Since the OneLake catalog is an evolution of the OneLake data hub, it already shows up in Microsoft 365, such as in Excel and Microsoft Teams and many other products in the Microsoft cloud for easy data consumption. OneLake catalog value can be extended to the Microsoft Purview data governance solution, Unified Catalog, which offers the data office, data stewards, and data owners advanced governance capabilities, including data quality and a global catalog for the heterogeneous data estate. The Explore tab is now generally available, and the Govern tab will be coming soon in preview.  

Learn more about the OneLake catalog by reading this blog post and by watching the following demo:

More Fabric innovation

The introduction of Fabric Databases and the growing opportunity with generative AI in accelerating data projects has encouraged us to reimagine the pillars of Fabric. We are now focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

• An AI-powered data platform. Fabric can give your teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment. You can even extend Fabric further by adding other native workloads from the Workload Hub, created by industry-leading partners.  
• An open and AI-ready data lake. Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and ensure your data is ready to power AI innovation.  
• AI-enabled business users. Fabric can empower everyone to better understand your data with AI-enhanced Q&A experiences and visuals embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 
• A mission-critical foundation. You can confidently deploy and manage Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. 

Check out the new Fabric sizzle video to see these pillars in action: 

We’re excited to share a huge slate of announcements designed to help us better accomplish each goal above. These enhancements include: 

Fabric workload enhancements

• The general availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a single place for all your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data needs. Julie Nikulina, IT Solutions Engineer at Schaeffler AG, a global automotive and industrial supplier, mentioned that, “thanks to Microsoft Fabric, we’ll be able to answer lots of questions about climate neutrality and decarbonization company-wide via a single platform—and we can implement new use cases in short sprints within two to six weeks.”  
• Coming soon, the preview of AI functions in Fabric notebooks, which provide a simplified API for common AI text enrichments like summarization, translation, sentiment analysis, and more. 
• The general availability of API for GraphQL, which is an API to help you access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. 
• The preview of several enhancements to Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, which include new Fabric events, enhancements to Eventstreams and Eventhouses, and easier real-time dashboard sharing. 
• The preview of the Copilot in Fabric experience for data pipelines in Fabric Data Factory. 
• The preview of our integration with Esri ArcGIS for advanced spatial analytics. 

Microsoft OneLake enhancements

• The preview of open mirroring, a feature that allows any application or data provider to write change data directly into a mirrored database within Fabric. 
• The general availability of Azure SQL DB mirroring and the preview of SQL MI mirroring. 

New AI capabilities in Fabric

• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill enhancements, including a more conversational experience and support for semantic models and Eventhouse KQL databases. 
• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill integration with Agent Service in the newly announced Azure AI Foundry, allowing developers to use AI skills as a core knowledge source. 

Platform-wide enhancements

• The preview of workspace monitoring, which provides detailed diagnostic logs for workspaces to troubleshoot performance issues, capacity performance, and data downtime. 
• The general availability of the Workload Development Kit, created to help software developers design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric. We’re excited to see many of our industry-leading partners announce preview of their workload hub offerings, including Quantexa, SAS, Teradata, Osmos, Esri, and Profisee. 
• The preview of further integration with Microsoft Purview including extending Protection policies to enforce access permissions to more sources and using Data Loss Prevention policies to restrict access to semantic models with sensitive data. 
• The general availability of external data sharing allows you to directly share OneLake tables and folders with other Fabric tenants in an easy, quick, and secure manner. 
• Fabric is FedRAMP High certified for the Azure Commercial cloud, the highest level of compliance and security standards required by the federal government for cloud service providers. Now government agencies can run Fabric on the Azure Commercial cloud while maintaining strict compliance. 

You can learn more about all of these announcements and so much more in the Fabric November 2024 Update blog post and the numerous blog posts that will go live throughout this week on the Fabric blog channel.  

Fabric billing and consumption updates

Finally, we’re making some important changes to Fabric’s billing model. First, coming soon, organizations with multiple capacities can now direct Copilot in Fabric consumption and billing to a specific capacity, no matter where the Copilot in Fabric usage actually takes place. Admins can assign specific members of their organization to the specified F64 or higher capacity for all of their Copilot requests. These requests will be consumed and billed on that assigned F64+ capacity, ensuring Copilot in Fabric usage doesn’t impact priority jobs while expanding Copilot access to any workspace regardless of its capacity.

Additionally, we’re providing capacity admins with more control over the Fabric jobs running in their capacities. Surge protection, now in preview, helps protect capacities from unexpected surges in background workload consumption. Admins can use surge protection to set a limit on background activity consumption, which will prevent background jobs from starting when reached. Admins can configure different limits for each capacity in your organization to give you the flexibility to meet your needs.

Watch Fabric in action at Microsoft Ignite

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 from November 19 to November 21, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:  

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz
• “Power AI apps with unified data and insights in Microsoft Fabric” with Panos Antonopoulos, Anna Hoffman, and Asad Khan 
• “Ingest, govern, and secure your data with OneLake” with Josh Caplan, Wilson Lee, and Adi Regev 
• “Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI” with Yitzhak Kesselman, Tessa Kloster, Niraj Revankar, Vijay Sankaran, and Ksenia Suresh. 

And six other Fabric breakout sessions. You can also join us at labs and theater sessions throughout the event. Find all the data-related sessions at Ignite. You can also learn about other announcements across our Azure portfolio by reading these blogs by Jessica Hawk and Omar Khan. 

• The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more: We’re bringing a huge range of innovation to our AI platform including the new Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform designed to empower both developers and business decision-makers in the age of AI. 
• Scale your AI transformation with a powerful, secure, and adaptive cloud infrastructure: We’re also announcing cloud and AI infrastructure announcements, from advancements in chips and liquid cooling to new data integrations and more flexible cloud deployments.  

Finally, if you want more strategic guidance to help you along your data and analytics journey in the era of AI, you should watch the recent Data and Analytics Forum.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. Learn how to start your free trial.  

If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help deciding on a SKU, we’re excited to share a new Fabric SKU estimator, now in private preview. You can sign up to try out this tool as part of the early adopter program—try the SKU estimator.

Start building your Fabric skills

Be one of the first to start using Fabric Databases

Ready to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default? Starting December 3, 2024, join live sessions with database experts and see just how easy it is to get started. View the schedule and register for the series.

Get certified in Microsoft Fabric—for free

Get ready to fast-track your career by earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification. For a limited time, we’re offering 5,000 free DP-600 exam vouchers to eligible Fabric community members. Complete your exam by the end of the year and join the ranks of certified experts. Don’t miss this opportunity to get certified. 

A new Fabric certification for data engineers

We’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you demonstrate your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. To earn this certification, pass Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric, currently in beta.

Join us at the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Looking to gain hands-on experience with Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it? If so, join us from March 29 to April 3, 2025, at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register today. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• Register for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners:

• “Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft Purview,” by CloudThat Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
•  “Key Fabric Announcements and Overview of Fabric Databases,” by Telefónica Tech.
• “Ignite 2024 – Microsoft Fabric announcements: the continued convergence of data platform and analytics to deliver intelligent insights,” by BJSS. 
• “Architecting tomorrow—A Microsoft Fabric Blueprint to intelligent enterprise covering Fabric Databases, AI Skills, Fabric and Microsoft Purview, Apache Iceberg support in OneLake,” by Avasoft Inc.
• “Microsoft Fabric Databases,” “Microsoft Fabric’s AI Skills,” and “Data Engineering: Liquid Clustering in Fabric,” by Verne Tech.
• “A First Look at Fabric Mirroring for SQL Managed Instance,” by Coeo Ltd.
• “Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Dynamics 365 with Dataverse,” and “Automating Data Workflows in Microsoft Fabric: A Low-Code/No-Code Approach,” by PreludeSys.
• “Enabling self-service for supply chain analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Direct Lake,” “Transforming data operations with Microsoft Fabric and CI/CD for ISVs,” and “How Microsoft Fabric transformed data analytics for an ISV with Real-Time Intelligence,” by MAQ Software.
• “Real Time Intelligence for the Rest of Us with Microsoft Fabric,” by iLink Digital.       

¹Based upon n=209 user studies conducted by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured four common metrics associated with the consumption experience of Power BI in Microsoft Fabric. Qualitative sentiment gathered upon task completion. The actual results may vary. 

²Based upon n=210 user studies conducted with technical practitioners by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured time to complete four common tasks associated with AI application development on a SQL database in Microsoft Fabric and on Azure SQL Database. Actual results may vary based upon individual performance and sentiment.

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Microsoft is excited to announce an expanded partnership with Snowflake, marking a significant step forward in our commitment to providing customers with a seamless data experience. This will enable bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring more efficient and flexible data management. 

With the launch of Fabric, we introduced OneLake—a single, unified, software as a service (SaaS) open data foundation, establishing our commitment to open standards. We are now taking our commitment to open standards further by including support for Iceberg, in addition to Delta Lake in Microsoft Fabric OneLake. This means that applications that support Iceberg (including Snowflake) or Delta Lake can interoperate with Fabric. This empowers our customers with diverse environments to work across applications and platforms, with OneLake providing an open data lake foundation for unifying their data estate.

Microsoft Fabric

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What are we announcing? 

Microsoft and Snowflake are working to enable the following capabilities, which will light up over the coming months: 

• OneLake will support Iceberg, alongside Delta Lake. This will be done using the Apache XTable project that both Microsoft and Snowflake are committed to. 
• Snowflake will be able to store data in Iceberg format in OneLake. 
• Data written by either platform, Snowflake or Fabric, will be available in both Iceberg and Delta Lake formats through XTable translation in OneLake. 
• Snowflake will be able to read any Fabric data artifact in OneLake, stored physically or virtually through shortcuts. 
• Snowflake data items will light up experiences in any of the Fabric engines as well as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure AI Studio, and Copilot for Microsoft 365. 

What does it mean for you? 

With this integration, you will be able to work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric, regardless of whether the data is stored using Delta Lake or Iceberg format. This enables a number of compelling scenarios: 

• Bi-directional data access across Fabric and Snowflake ensures that data can be analyzed across any of the engines in Fabric, or in Snowflake, depending on the customer’s needs.  
• You will also be able to access your data through your favorite apps such as Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and Studio. 
• With OneLake data accessible in both Snowflake and Fabric, you can reduce the time spent integrating applications and organizing your data estate, reduce the costs of duplicating data across various locations, and dedicate more time to discovering insights. 

“We’ve heard from many of our mutual customers that they want increased interoperability across Snowflake and Fabric in a seamless, cost-efficient manner. As both Snowflake and Microsoft are firm believers in open standards, we see our joint support for Apache Iceberg as an opportunity to offer customers choice when it comes to how and where they interact with their data.” 

—Christian Kleinerman, Executive Vice President of Product at Snowflake  

Unify your data estate 

The rationale behind this expanded partnership is clear: to give our customers an edge in harnessing their digital investments by helping them simplify and unify their data estate with OneLake in Fabric. By combining the strengths of Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake, two leading data platforms, we are further expanding our commitment to open standards, and empowering our customers to do more with their data with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. 

Learn the latest about Fabric in our blog “Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric.”

The post Snowflake and Microsoft announce expansion of their partnership appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With Microsoft Fabric, we are simplifying and future-proofing your data estate with an ever-evolving, AI-powered data analytics platform. Fabric will keep up with the trends for you and seamlessly integrate each new capability so you can spend less time integrating and managing your data estate and more time unlocking value from your data.  

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Set up Fabric for your business and discover resources that help you take the first steps

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Aurizon, Australia’s largest rail freight operator, turned to Fabric to modernize their data estate and analytics system.

“With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve answered many of our questions about navigating future growth, to remove legacy systems, and to streamline and simplify our architecture. A trusted data platform sets us up to undertake complex predictive analytics and optimizations that will give greater surety for our business and drive commercial benefits for Aurizon and our customers in the very near future.”

—Tammy Wigg, Chief Data Analytics Officer at Aurizon

Aurizon is just one among thousands of customers who have already used Fabric to revolutionize how they connect to and analyze their data. In fact, a 2024 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Microsoft Fabric customers saw a three-year 379% return on investment (ROI) with a payback period of less than six months. We are thrilled to share a huge range of new capabilities coming to Fabric. These innovations will help you more effectively uncover insights and keep you at the forefront of the trends in data and analytics. Check out a quick overview of the biggest changes coming to Fabric.

Fabric is a complete data platform

Fabric is a complete data platform—giving your data teams the ability to unify, transform, analyze, and unlock value from data from a single, integrated software as a service (SaaS) experience. We are excited to announce additions to the Fabric workloads that will make Fabric’s capabilities even more robust and even customizable to meet the unique needs of each organization. These enhancements include: 

1. A completely redesigned workload, Real-Time Intelligence, that brings together and enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator to help you analyze and act on high-volume, high-granular event streaming data and even explore your organization’s real-time data in the new Real-time hub.

2. New tools like the Fabric Workload Development Kit, Application Programming Interface (API) for GraphQL™, and “user data functions” that can help developers build powerful solutions on the Fabric platform. 

3. A new feature in the Microsoft Azure Data Factory experience called Data workflow, powered by Apache Airflow runtime, that can help you author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python. 

Unlock continuous insights with Real-Time Intelligence and the Real-time hub

When we introduced Fabric, it launched with seven core workloads which included Synapse Real-time Analytics for data streaming analysis and Data Activator for monitoring and triggering actions in real-time. We are unveiling an enhanced workload called Real-Time Intelligence that combines these workloads and brings an array of additional new features, in preview, to help organizations make better decisions with up-to-the-minute insights. From ingestion to transformation, querying, and taking immediate action, Real-Time Intelligence is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to land it first. With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger actions like alerting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail. And with both simple, low-code or no-code, and powerful, code-rich interfaces, Real-Time Intelligence empowers every user to work with real-time data. 

Behind this powerful workload is the Real-time hub, a single place to discover, manage, and use event streaming data from Fabric and other data sources from Microsoft, third-party cloud providers, and other external data sources. Just like the OneLake data hub makes it easy to discover, manage, and use the data at rest, the Real-time hub can help you do the same for data in motion. All events that flow through the Real-time hub can be easily transformed and routed to any Fabric data store and users can create new streams that can be discovered and consumed. From the Real-time hub, users can gain insights through the data profile, configure the right level of endorsement, set alerts on changing conditions and more, all without leaving the hub. While the existing Real-Time Analytics capabilities are still generally available, the Real-time hub and the other new capabilities coming to the Real-Time Intelligence workload are currently in preview. Watch this demo video to check out the redesigned Real-Time Intelligence experience:  

Elcome, one of the world’s largest marine electronics companies, built a new service on Fabric called “Welcome” that helps maritime crews stay connected to their families and friends.

Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence has been the essential building block that’s enabled us to monitor, manage, and enhance the services we provide. With the help of the Real-time hub for centrally managing data in motion from our diverse sources and Data Activator for event-based triggers, Fabric’s end-to-end cloud solution has empowered us to easily understand and act on high-volume, high-granularity events in real-time with fewer resources.”

—Jimmy Grewal, Managing Director of Elcome

Real-time insights are becoming increasingly critical across industries like route optimization in transportation and logistics, grid monitoring in energy and utilities, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and inventory management in retail. And since Real-Time Intelligence comes fully optimized and integrated in a SaaS platform, adoption is seamless. Strathan Campbell, Channel Environment Technology Lead at One NZ—the largest mobile carrier in New Zealand—said they “…went from a concept to a delivered product in just two weeks.” To learn more about the Real-Time Intelligence workload, watch the “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session or read the Real-Time Intelligence blog.  

Extend Fabric with your own, custom workloads and experiences

Fabric was built from the ground up to be extensible, customizable, and open. Now, we are making it even easier for software developers and customers to design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric with the new Fabric Workload Development Kit—currently in preview. Applications built with this kit will appear as a native workload within Fabric, providing a consistent experience for users directly in their Fabric environment without any manual effort. Software developers can publish and monetize their custom workloads through Azure Marketplace. And, coming soon, we are creating a workload hub experience in Fabric where users can discover, add, and manage these workloads without ever leaving the Fabric environment. We already have industry-leading partners building on Fabric including SAS, Esri, Informatica, Teradata, and Neo4j.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit by watching the “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

We are also excited to announce two new features, both in preview, created with developers in mind: API for GraphQL and user data functions in Fabric. API for GraphQL is a flexible and powerful RESTful API that allows data professionals to access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. With API for GraphQL, you can streamline requests to reduce network overheads and accelerate response rates. User data functions are user-defined functions built for Fabric experiences across all data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, or event streams. These features enable developers to build experiences and applications using Fabric data sources more easily like lakehouses, data warehouses, mirrored databases, and more with native code ability, custom logic, and seamless integration. You can watch these features in action in the “Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit, the API for GraphQL, user data functions, and more by reading the Integrating ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric blog.

Orchestrate complex data workflows in the Fabric Data Factory workload

We are also announcing the preview of Data workflows in Fabric as part of the Data Factory experience. Data workflows allow customers to define Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) files for complex data workflow orchestration in Fabric. Data workflows is powered by the Apache Airflow runtime and designed to help you author, schedule and monitor workflows or data pipelines using python. Learn more by reading the data workflows blog.  

Fabric is lake-centric and open

The typical data estate has grown organically over time to span multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines with a multitude of vendors and specialized services. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake built to span an entire organization, can connect to data from across your data estate and reduce data duplication and sprawl.  

We are excited to announce the expansion of OneLake shortcuts to connect to data from on-premises and network-restricted data sources beyond just Azure Data Lake Service Gen2, now in preview. With an on-premises data gateway, you can now create shortcuts to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and S3 compatible storage buckets that are either on-premises or otherwise network-restricted. To learn more about these announcements, watch the Microsoft Build session “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric.”  

Empower business users with Fabric

Insights drive impact only when they reach those who can use them to inform actions and decisions. Professional and citizen analysts bridge the gap between data and business results, and with Fabric, they have the tools to quickly manage, analyze, visualize, and uncover insights that can be shared with the entire organization. We are excited to help analysts work even faster and more effectively by releasing the model explorer and the DAX query view in Microsoft Power BI Desktop into general availability.

The model explorer in Microsoft Power BI provides a rich view of all the semantic model objects in the data pane—helping you find items in your data fast. You can also use the model explorer to create calculation groups and reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic and simplifying semantic model consumption. 

The DAX query view in Power BI Desktop lets users discover, analyze, and see the data in their semantic model using the DAX query language. Users working with a model can validate data and measures without having to build a visual or use an additional tool—similar to the Explore feature. Changes made to measures can be seamlessly updated directly back to the semantic model. 

To learn more about these announcements and others coming to Power BI, check out the Power BI blog.  

Fabric is AI-powered

When ChatGPT was launched, it had over 100 million users in just over two months—the steepest adoption curve in the history of technology.¹ It’s been a year and a half since that launch, and organizations are still trying to translate the benefit of generative AI from novelty to actual business results. By infusing generative AI into every layer of Fabric, we can empower your data professionals to employ its benefits, in the right context and in the right scenario to get more done, faster.  

Use Copilot in Fabric, now generally available 

Copilot in Fabric was designed to help users unlock the full potential of their data by assisting data professionals to be more productive and business users to explore their data more easily. With Copilot in Fabric, you can use conversational language to create dataflows, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. We are excited to share that Copilot in Fabric is now generally available, starting with the Power BI experience. This includes the ability to create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. Copilot in Fabric is also now enabled on-by-default for all eligible tenants including Copilot in Fabric experiences for Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence, which are all still in preview. The general availability of Copilot in Fabric for the Power BI experience will be rolling out over the coming weeks to all customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher). 

We are also thrilled to announce a new Copilot in Fabric experience for Real-Time Intelligence, currently in preview, that enables users to explore real-time data with ease. Starting with a Kusto Query Language (KQL) Queryset connected to a KQL Database in an Eventhouse or a standalone Azure Data Explorer database, you can type your question in conversational language and Copilot will automatically translate it to a KQL query you can execute. This experience is especially powerful for users less familiar with writing KQL queries but still want to get the most from their time-series data stored in Eventhouse. 

Create custom Q&A experiences with your data with AI skills 

We are also thrilled to release a new AI capability in preview called AI skills—an innovative experience designed to provide any user with a conversational Q&A experience about their data. AI skills allow you to simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. AI skills can empower everyone to explore data, build and configure AI experiences, and get the answers and insights they need.  

AI skills will honor existing security permissions and can be configured to respect the unique language and nuances of your organization, ensuring that responses are not just data-driven but steeped in the context of your business operations. And, coming soon, it can also enrich the creation of new copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio and be interacted with from Copilot for Microsoft for 365. It’s about making your data not just accessible but approachable, inviting users to explore insights through natural dialogue, and shortening the time to insight.

New partnerships with Microsoft Fabric

Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric

With the launch of Fabric, we’ve committed to open data formats, standards, and interoperability with our partners to give our customers the flexibility to do what makes sense for their business. We are taking this commitment a step further by expanding our existing partnership with Snowflake to expand interoperability between Snowflake and Fabric’s OneLake. We are excited to announce future support for Apache Iceberg in Fabric OneLake and bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Fabric. This integration will enable users to analyze their Fabric and Snowflake data written in Iceberg format in any engine within either platform, and access data across apps like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Azure AI Studio.

With the upcoming availability of shortcuts for Iceberg in OneLake, Fabric users will be able to access all data sources in Iceberg format, including the Iceberg sources from Snowflake, and translate metadata between Iceberg and Delta formats. This means you can work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric. Since all the OneLake data can be accessed in Snowflake as well as in Fabric, this integration will enable you to spend less time stitching together applications and your data estate, and more time uncovering insights. To learn more about this announcement, read the Fabric and Snowflake partnership blog.

Adobe and Microsoft Fabric 

We are also excited to announce we are expanding our existing relationship with Adobe. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Campaign will have the ability to federate enterprise data from Fabric. Our joint customers will soon have the capability to connect to Fabric and use the Fabric Data Warehouse for query federation to create and enrich audiences for engagement, without having to transfer or extract the data from Fabric. 

Combine Fabric and Microsoft Azure Databricks to get the best of both worlds

We are excited to announce that we are expanding the integration between Fabric and Azure Databricks—allowing you to have a truly unified experience across both products and pick the right tools for any scenario. 

Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration with Fabric 

Coming soon, you will be able to access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly in Fabric, making it even easier to unify Azure Databricks with Fabric. From the Fabric portal, you can create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item in Fabric with just a few clicks. You can add a full catalog, a schema, or even individual tables to link and the management of this Azure Databricks item in OneLake—a shortcut connected to Unity Catalog—is automatically taken care of for you.  

This data acts like any other data in OneLake—you can write SQL queries or use it with any other workloads in Fabric including Power BI through Direct Lake mode. When the data is modified or tables are added, removed, or renamed in Azure Databricks, the data in Fabric will remain always in sync. This new integration makes it simple to unify Azure Databricks data in Fabric and seamlessly use it across every Fabric workload. 

Federate OneLake as a Remote Catalog in Azure Databricks 

Also coming soon, Fabric users will be able to access Fabric data items like lakehouses as a catalog in Azure Databricks. While the data remains in OneLake, you can access and view data lineage and other metadata in Azure Databricks and leverage the full power of Unity Catalog. This includes extending Unity Catalog’s unified governance over data and AI into Azure Databricks Mosaic AI. In total, you will be able to combine this data with other native and federated data in Azure Databricks, perform analysis assisted by generative AI, and publish the aggregated data back to Power BI—making this integration complete across the entire data and AI lifecycle. 

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build 2024

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21 to 23, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions: 

• “Microsoft Build opening keynote” with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha.

• “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud” with Scott Guthrie.

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz.

• “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” with Yitzhak Kesselman and Tessa Kloster.

• “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” with Dipti Borkar and Teddy Bercovitz.

• Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” with Monica Boris and Dipti Borkar.

• “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric” with Josh Caplan and Charles Webb.

• “Accelerate insights with real-time Azure SQL Data and Microsoft Fabric” with Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward.
• “Intergrating Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric for Next-Gen AI Solutions” with Nellie Gustafsson and Facundo Santiago.
• “Activate enterprise data in AI-enabled business applications” with Rakesh Krishnan and Srikumar Nair.

You can also try out these new capabilities and everything Fabric has to offer yourself by signing up for a free 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 Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page. 

Join us at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 

We are excited to announce a European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference that will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from September 23 to 26, 2024. You can see firsthand how Fabric and the rest of the data and AI products at Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. You will hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands on experiences with the latest features from Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more. You will also have the opportunity 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 Fabric.   

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read about other Azure announcements:  

• • From code to production: New ways Azure helps your build transformational AI experiences.

• • Unleashing innovation: The new era of compute powering Azure AI solutions.

• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Read the new Microsoft Fabric security whitepaper.
• Watch the Real-Time Intelligence Microsoft Mechanics video.
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

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¹ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note, Reuters.

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The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024, taking place March 26 to 28, 2024, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, is your opportunity to learn more about the platform and its benefits to security, storage, and the developer experience. Sessions in the platform track will cover the core value of the Fabric platform and how you can use it to extract intelligence from data easily and securely. Here are some of the key topics you will be able to explore.

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

Join us March 26 to 28, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada

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Security and governance

• Protecting Your Data in Fabric: The Fabric Security Stack
  Master the Fabric security stack, encompassing granular data security, roles and permissions, and network security features, to safeguard your data estate with Meenal Srivastva, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft and Dandan Zhang, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft. 
• Administering your data estate with Fabric
  Discover standard and flexible approaches to Fabric administration through the Fabric admin portal or API automation with Radhakrishnan Srinivasan, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft, Arthi Ramasubramanian Iyer, Group Program Manager, Microsoft, and Nicky van Vroenhoven, Microsoft Data Platform MVP. 
• Fabric Security: Everything You Need to Know!
  Demystify Fabric’s comprehensive security suite, covering user authentication, Microsoft Entra ID integration, data storage, access control, and Microsoft Purview governance with Kasper de Jonge, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft and Venkatesh Parasuraman, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft. 
• Leveraging Microsoft Purview for Data Protection in Microsoft Fabric
  Explore Fabric’s built-in capabilities for enforcing data protection policies, leveraging Microsoft Purview Information Protection, data loss prevention, and Microsoft Purview hub with Anton Fritz, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft, Sruly Taber, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft, Wolfgang Strasser, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and Yael Biss, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft. 
• Govern, Manage, and Protect All Your Data in Fabric and Beyond
  Unify data governance, management, and protection across your organization with Fabric’s built-in governance and compliance experiences powered by Microsoft Purview with Adi Regev, Partner Group Program Manager, Microsoft, Marthe Moengen, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and Yaron Canari, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft. 

Microsoft OneLake—The OneDrive for data

• Building a Modern Data Lake with OneLake: The OneDrive for Data
  Eliminate data silos and unify your data across the organization with OneLake, the single, unified storage system for Fabric with Josh Caplan, Principal Group Product Manager, Microsoft and Elizabeth Oldag, Principal Product Manager Lead, Microsoft. 
• Unlocking OneLake: Shortcuts and Connectivity
  Leverage OneLake’s shortcuts for quick access to existing data across cloud providers and explore effective data loading, structuring, and access methods with Matthew Hicks, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft, Sruly Taber, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft, and Trevor Olson, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft. 
• Empowering Data Platforms with Microsoft OneLake
  Uncover how OneLake, the unified data lake within Fabric, eliminates data silos and empowers users for business intelligence, machine learning, and more with Prathy Kamasani, Microsoft MVP. 

Developer experience and extensibility 

• Leveraging CI/CD Capabilities in Microsoft Fabric
  Empower your analytics team with CI/CD for efficient analytics delivery, covering the entire DataOps flow in Fabric with Nimrod Shalit, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft and Marc Lelijveld, Microsoft MVP. 
• Utilizing the New Fabric Public APIs for Seamless End-to-End Workflows
  Automate Fabric workflows with the Fabric public API platform, enabling end-to-end automation and API surface expansion with Alon Baram, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft and Alon Yeshurun, Software Engineer II, Microsoft. 
• Accelerate Copilot Adoption and Automation of Business Insights with Microsoft Fabric – Dataverse 2-way Integration
  Integrate Fabric and Dataverse—the SaaS Data and AI platform—for building complex business applications and processes driven by Fabric insights with Milinda Vitharana, Principal Lead Program Manager, Microsoft and Mudit Mittal, Principal Group Engineer Manager, Microsoft. 
• Bridging the Gap Between Data and Applications with Fabric Data APIs
  Build consistent, efficient, and flexible data APIs with Fabric to integrate data into applications seamlessly with Dipti Borkar, Vice President and General Manager, Microsoft and Monica Boris, Group Product Manager, Microsoft. 
• Analytics with Microsoft Azure Databricks and Fabric—latest developments
  Discover the latest integrations between Fabric and Azure Databricks across Azure Confidential Computing, Power BI, and Fabric Data Factory with Lindsey Allen, General Manager, Microsoft Azure and Ronald Chang, Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft. 
• Custom Code in Fabric: Build Re-usable Business Logic into Your Analytics Solutions
  Enhance your analytics solutions with custom code in Fabric for tailored business requirements with Dipti Borkar, Vice President and General Manager, Microsoft and Monica Boris, Group Product Manager, Microsoft. 

Transitioning to Fabric  

• Upgrading Your Data Estate to Fabric
  Learn about strategies and best practices for transitioning your data estate to Fabric, covering data engineering, data integration, and data warehousing with Artur Viera and Aitor Murguzur, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft. 
• Creating Value Using a Unified SaaS Experience in Microsoft Fabric
  Explore the intuitive user interface of Fabric, designed to structure data products, navigate seamlessly, and deliver value to your business with Ravs Kaur, Partner General Manager, Microsoft and Jie Su, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft. 

Don’t miss out on this exciting event

The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 is an in-person event only. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn about Fabric and see firsthand how Fabric and the rest of the data and AI products at Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. We look forward to engaging with you all in-person in Las Vegas, Nevada in March 2024.  

Sign up here using the code MSCUST to save $100 off your registration.

Can’t wait to get started learning about Fabric? 

Want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric? Check out the Fabric Career Hub for training, skills challenges, career insights and more. For a limited time, you can also receive a 100% off discount on the Fabric DP-600 exam. Visit the Fabric Career Hub and start your journey to becoming a Fabric Analytics Engineer.

The post Understanding the benefits of a unified analytics platform at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 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.

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