Microsoft Fabric: Data Analytics for the Era of AI

Data is the most valuable asset in today’s world, and AI is the key to unlocking its potential. But how can you build and manage data and AI solutions that are innovative, intelligent, and responsible? In this blog post, we take a deeper dive into Microsoft Fabric, a new cloud service that integrates data and analytics tools into a single unified platform for the era of AI.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a complete data platform that addresses every aspect of your data estate. Fabric not only provides a unified data stack with shared experiences, architecture, security, governance, and compliance, but it also spans across all workloads and personas that touch data.

Fabric integrates cloud-based data analytics and integration services like Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory into a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. With Fabric, you can access high-quality vision, speech, language, and decision-making AI models through simple API calls, and create your own machine learning models using an AI supercomputing infrastructure, familiar tools like Jupyter Notebooks and Visual Studio Code, and open-source frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch—all backed by Microsoft’s responsible AI principles.

Fabric also provides role-specific experiences for every team in the analytics process, so data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users can work seamlessly together.

What are the benefits of Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric offers several benefits for data and AI solutions, such as:

• Simplicity: Fabric simplifies the complexity of data and analytics by providing a single service that encompasses data ingestion, transformation, storage, and exposure through reports or SQL endpoints. You don’t need to stitch together different products or worry about compatibility issues. You can also use familiar tools and languages to work with your data and AI models.
• Performance: Fabric delivers high performance for your data and AI workloads by leveraging Azure’s scalable and secure infrastructure. You can run queries on petabytes of data in seconds using Synapse-powered data warehousing or Direct Lake capabilities. You can also access state-of-the-art AI models powered by OpenAI through Azure OpenAI Service, which runs on Azure’s supercomputing clusters.
• Collaboration: Fabric fosters collaboration among various roles within a single unified SaaS experience that is secure and governed by default. You can share data sets, notebooks, reports, dashboards, and models with your team members or external stakeholders. You can also use Power BI’s rich visualization features to create interactive reports and dashboards that tell compelling stories with your data.
• Innovation: Fabric enables innovation by providing access to the latest AI technologies and capabilities. You can leverage generative AI and language models like GPT-4 to create natural language understanding, natural language generation, computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and other AI capabilities for your applications. You can also fine-tune the models with your own data to customize them for your specific scenarios.

How are customers using Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is already being used by customers across various industries and domains to solve their data and AI challenges. Here are some examples:

• Hitachi Solutions used Fabric to integrate their data sources seamlessly using Data Factory in Fabric. They were able to reduce their development time by 50% and improve their customer satisfaction by 30%.
• Delphix has used Fabric to solve their diverse data integration needs. They were able to accelerate their data delivery by 10x and reduce their costs by 80%.
• Walgreens Boots Alliance used Fabric to build a unified data platform that enabled them to optimize their supply chain operations, improve their customer loyalty programs, and enhance their pharmacy services.
• Unilever used Fabric to create a global data lake that empowered them to gain insights into their consumer behavior, product performance, and market trends. They were able to increase their revenue by 5% and reduce their carbon footprint by 15%.

How can you get started with Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is the ultimate AI-enhanced data platform! It simplifies, accelerates, and democratizes data and AI solutions for every organization. Whether you need an end-to-end analytics platform like Fabric Lakehouse, access to advanced AI models like Azure OpenAI Service, or a secure way to run machine learning code in SQL Server, Fabric has you covered. Talk to us about how Fabric can help your business thrive in the age of AI!

Precio Fishbone is a Microsoft Solutions Partner in Data & AI that specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data to make smarter decisions, optimize performance, and achieve their goals. We’ve been helping others across a range of industries for over 20 years and are the experts in designing and building scalable, secure, and reliable solutions that are tailored to your unique business.