At Microsoft Build in 2023 the world first heard about a new offering from Microsoft called Microsoft Fabric. Reactions to the announcement ranged from “meh” to “what is this?” To be fair, this is the typical reaction most people have when you talk data with them.
Many of us had no idea what to make of Fabric. To me, it seemed as if Microsoft were doing a rebranding of sorts. They changed the name of Azure Synapse Analytics, also called a Dedicated SQL Pool, and previously known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Microsoft excels (ha!) at renaming products every 18 months, keeping customers guessing if anyone is leading product marketing.
Microsoft Fabric also came with this thing called OneLake, a place for all your company data. Folks with an eye on data security, privacy, and governance thought the idea of OneLake was madness. The idea of combining all your company data into one big bucket seemed like a lot of administrative overhead. But OneLake also offers a way to separate storage and compute, allowing for greater scalability. This is a must-have when you are competing with companies like Databricks and Snowflake, and other cloud service providers such as AWS and Google.
After Some Thought…
After the dust had settled and time passed, the launch and concept of Fabric started to make more sense. For the past 15+ years, Microsoft has been building the individual pieces of Fabric. Here’s a handful of features and services Fabric contains:
- Data Warehouse/Lakehouse – the storing of large volumes of structured and unstructured data in OneLake, which separates storage and compute
- Real-time analytics – the ability to stream data into OneLake, or pull data from external sources such as SnowFlake
- Data Engineering – the ability to extract, load, and transform data including the use of notebooks
- Data Science – leverage machine learning to gain insights from your data
- PowerBI – create interactive reports and dashboards
Many of these services were built to support traditional data storage, retrieval, and analytical processing. This type of data processing focuses on data at rest, as opposed to streaming event data. This is not to say you couldn’t use these services for streaming, you could try if you wanted. After all, the building blocks for real-time analytics go back to SQL Server 2008, with the release of StreamInsight, a fancy way to build pipelines for refreshing dashboards with up to date data.
Streaming event data is where the real data race is taking place today. According to the IDC, by 2025 nearly 30% of data will need real-time processing. This is the market Microsoft, among others, is targeting, which is roughly 54 ZB in size.
So, it seems the more data collected, the more likely it is used for real-time processing. Therefore, if you are a cloud company, it is rather important to your bottom line to find a way to make it easy for your customers to store their data in your cloud. The next best thing, of course, is making it easy for your customers to use your tools and services to work with data stored elsewhere. This is part of the brilliance of Fabric, as it allows ease of access to real time data you are already using in places like Databricks, Confluent, and Snowflake.
The Bundle
Now, if you are Microsoft, with a handful of data services ready to meet the needs of a growing market, you have some choices to make. You could continue to do what you have done for 15+ years and keep selling individual products and services and hope you earn some of the market going forward. Or you could bundle the products and services, unifying them into one platform, and make it easy for users to ingest, transform, analyze, and report on their data.
Well, if you want to gain market share, bundling makes the most sense. And Microsoft is uniquely positioned to pull this off for two reasons. First, they have a comprehensive data platform which is second to none. Sure, you can point to other companies who might do one of those services better, but there is no company on Earth, or in the Cloud, which offers a complete end-to-end data platform like Fabric.
Second, bundling software is something Microsoft has a history of doing, and doing it quite well in some cases. People reading this post in 2024 may not be old enough to recall a time when you purchased individual software products like Excel and Word. But I do recall the time before Microsoft Office existed. Bundling everything into Fabric allows users to work with their data anywhere and, most importantly to Microsoft’s bottom line, the result is more data flowing to Azure servers.
I am not here to tell you everything is perfect with Fabric. In the past year I have seen a handful of negative comments about Fabric, most of them nitpicking about things like brand names, data type support, and file formats. There is always going to be a person upset about how Widget X isn’t the Most Perfect Thing For Them at This Moment and They Need to Tell the World. I think most people believe when a product is released, even if it is marked as “Preview”, it should be able to meet the demands of every possible user. It is just not practical.
Summary
Microsoft Fabric was announced at Build this year to be GA, which also makes users believe it should meet the demands of every possible user. The fastest way for Microsoft to grab as much market share as possible is to focus on the customer experience and remove those barriers. You can find roadmap details here, giving you an idea about the effort going on behind the scenes with Fabric today. For example, for everyone who has raised issues with security and governance, you can see the list of what has shipped and what is planned here.
It is clear Microsoft is investing in Fabric, much like they invested in Office 30+ years ago. If there is one thing Microsoft knows how to do, it is creating value for shareholders:
Since the announcement of Fabric last May, Microsoft is up over 25%. I am not going to say the increase is the direct result of Fabric. What I am saying is Microsoft might have an idea about what they are doing, and why.
Microsoft Fabric is the new Office – it is a bundle of data products, meant to boost productivity for data professionals and dominate the data analytics landscape. Much in the same way Office dominates the business world.
