Microsoft Fabric is an integrated analytics SaaS platform that brings together all the tools and capabilities for a robust AI foundation. Built atop an open lake house, Fabric is natively integrated with several existing and new Microsoft capabilities to streamline data and analytics workflow, from data integration, engineering and data science.
Launched at Build 2023, Microsoft Fabric was made generally available in November last year. Touted as the most significant data product launch since the launch of SQL Server in 1989, it has been designed to simplify the way organizations work with data. It is powered with a robust enterprise-grade data foundation designed for the AI era.
Fabric is the new environment that brings together Data Factory, Synapse, Power BI, Data Activator. The architecture is centered around a multi-Cloud data lake called OneCloud that can pull data from Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform to provide a unified source of truth. Leveraging the concepts of a modern data architecture including data mesh and data lake, Fabric delivers ‘experiences’ and ‘workspaces’ wherein each workload or capability is designed to be an experience and each use case or workflow becomes a workspace.
Microsoft Fabric offers several value propositions, chief among which are the following.
Data Analytics As-a-Service: Fabric simplifies and offers everything as-a-service within a single environment, allowing organizations to just get started without worrying about licensing, infrastructure, administration or provisioning different resources separately. Instead of spending time on the nitty gritty of integration, optimization, data harmonization businesses can focus on utilizing data, perform analytics, design use cases and harness insights to innovate and grow.
Lake-Centric Approach: Fabric is built around OneLake—Microsoft’s Data lake solution—akin to how Microsoft’s 365 applications are automatically tied with OneDrive. Given that it is a single fabric that spans multiple Cloud, it eliminates data silos and empowers users with a unified data storage capability.
Designed for AI-experiences: Native integration with Azure’s Co-pilot at every level of the architecture empowers users to draw insights in conversational language without doing complex coding. This empowers employees with different personals to utilize GenAI capabilities to summarize reports and insights, build machine learning models, develop dataflows and pipelines, generate code and visualize results in custom conversational language experiences.
Empowering Data Personas: Aimed at facilitating data-based decision making, Fabric is integrated with Microsoft 365, providing a single copy of data to empower users—from business users, analysts, data scientist, machine learning specialist to developers—to draw insights.
Cost reduction: The unified data experience from resource provisioning, integration, and tool utilization using a single pool of compute for the entire data workload results in reduced cost and effort, as the single compute eliminates costs of idle resources provisioned for different resources.
Employing Microsoft Fabric to Benefit NewVision Customers
As an early proponent of Microsoft Fabric, NewVision Software has exploited these capabilities to benefit customers in myriad ways. One example is how NewVision has boosted post-merger integration capabilities using Microsoft Fabric to integrate disparate data systems and drive operational efficiencies to unlock the synergies of mergers.
Specifically, NewVision worked with a leading US-based orthodontist support platform to pursue its growth strategy via acquisitions. With more than 2.5 million patient visits spread across 72 locations, success was crucially linked to quick integration of acquired practices.
NewVision designed a robust data platform to cater to the current and future requirements by implementing a data agnostic layer on top of a data warehouse hosted in Microsoft OneLake, using Microsoft Fabric data pipelines to ingest and transform data quickly. This has empowered users to leverage Power BI to draw insights and pursue its aggressive acquisition-led growth strategy.
If you want to know more about Microsoft Fabric or how we empowered the orthodontist platform’s with data integration
