Microsoft Fabric is everywhere

Microsoft Fabric’s appeal lies in its unique features: Its agile nature as a SaaS solution that allows for quick setup times and eliminates the need for infrastructure management, its OneLake storage approach that supports the modern data lakehouse architecture, and it offers a seamlessly integrated data and AI experience that is familiar from Microsoft’s Azure. Although many of the platform’s possibilities have been on the market for some time in other solutions, the agility of deployment and time-to-value are unprecedented. 

Nortal is proud to be part of a select group of frontrunner partners who work actively and hands-on with Microsoft Fabric. Our recognition as a Microsoft Fabric Featured Partner is a testament to our recent experience deploying real-life customer solutions on Fabric.

With Nortal’s expertise from years of building Azure-based data platforms and workloads and working with tens of customer organizations, we have identified six concrete steps to get started with Microsoft Fabric and test it with real-life use cases. As we speak, we are applying these steps to our pioneering customers. 

Six steps and 4 – 8 weeks to a platform pilot

irst, we will scope the project to map the use cases in focus and the business value the customer wants to pull from them. A design-first approach ensures we understand the end-user’s needs and consider the solutions’ usability. Second, the data is modeled, and data architecture, Fabric capacity strategy, and governance are carefully designed to ensure that we build a scalable solution that suits future needs. Third, we will implement the solution separately in test, development, and production environments to allow further development without interfering with everyday business. Fourth, thorough testing always needs to be done from the viewpoints of the functionality, the integrations, the performance, and the end-user experience. As the fifth step, it is vital to train the customer’s end-users to ensure that knowledge is efficiently transferred from Nortal’s project team to the customer experts. Finally, we provide our customers with comprehensive solution documentation that includes the architecture decisions made during the pilot and the description of support mechanisms. This ensures that the solution keeps adding value to the customer’s business now and in the future. 

Although these six steps may seem laborious, they are crucial for the success of a data platform pilot project – no matter how agile the technology solution in question is. Also, with our well-thought-through process, the duration of all six steps can be squeezed to as little as four to eight weeks. While Microsoft Fabric as a solution is lightweight and scalable, so should the projects that help you prove its viability and usefulness.

As pointed out, it is almost surprising how many Finnish organizations are already looking at Microsoft Fabric, be their business in manufacturing, financial services, professional services, or the public sector. The delightful finding for many may be that if you are using PowerBI, you probably already are on the Microsoft Fabric wagon.

Microsoft Fabric capacity will replace Power BI capacity licenses

Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Fabric capacity licenses will replace Power BI Premium per capacity licenses. While Power BI enjoys the position as the leading business intelligence solution, holding more than one-third of the business intelligence market, it is likely that most of the leading organizations already have licenses for it. 

The change means that as a Power BI Premium customer, you will need to switch your existing Power BI Premium capacities to the new Fabric capacities at your next renewal. Once in Fabric, you’ll have access toother Fabric experiences, better integration with Azure services, and more flexible billing options, ensuring a seamless upgrade from pure Power BI to Microsoft Fabric without losing access to your current workspaces and data. 

Thus, the upcoming changes in Power BI licensing present new opportunities to leverage all the features of the Fabric platform instead of being limited to reporting only. However, this also introduces a challenge: when capacity is shared among Power BI and the other capabilities of Fabric, your organization might encounter a situation where capacity runs out from, e.g., the daily Power BI reporting. To avoid such disruptions in the accustomed reporting services, it is essential to have a skilled partner that can develop a Fabric capacity strategy. Such a strategy optimizes capacity acquisition for different domains and ensures that, for example, your data scientists and reporting have their dedicated resources in Fabric. 

So, without knowing, you may already be on board with what we consider the most interesting business analytics solution available today. With Nortal’s Microsoft Fabric Kick-Start concept, the risk and effort of proofing and implementing this new technology is minimal, while the potential benefits for your business could be massive.