Businesses face ongoing pressure to unify their data and marketing operations, to get a greater understanding of and further engage with their customers. This is highlighted by Microsoft’s internal engineering group – IDEAS – which manages 420 pebibytes of data from more than 2,500 sources, as well as supporting 600+ teams across Microsoft.
We’ve addressed this concern for our clients by creating a Modern Data Platform, powered by Microsoft Fabric.
Read on to learn about Microsoft Fabric and how Salocin Group has used it to combine data engineering, real-time insights and customer activation via Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) and Customer Insights, with the use of AI also playing an important role in both automation and personalisation.
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, which brings together data engineering, data warehousing, business intelligence, real-time analytics and data science into one integrated platform. The aim of Microsoft Fabric is to simplify the entire data lifecycle – this is where OneLake comes into play. OneLake allows for businesses to consolidate all their data into one ‘data lake’ – this creates a central, more scalable area that creates consistency and governance across multiple workloads.
Microsoft Fabric also has many integrations across the Microsoft tech stack, including Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Copilot. These integrations allow for smooth data flow, as well as further enhanced analytics capabilities.
Building the Lakehouse foundation
Lakehouse architecture is at the core of building a modern data platform. It provides a unified approach to both data storage and management as it combines the strengths of data lakes and data warehouses. It creates a cost-effective, scalable data storage, with the performance capabilities of a data warehouse.
Salocin Group’s Modern Data Platform utilises the Lakehouse architecture to centralise data from D365, third-party sources and operational systems. Before making it available to businesses for reporting, segmentation and activation, the data is cleaned, enhanced and remodelled.
Dynamics 365 + Fabric: closing the loop
A key feature of Fabric is its integration with D365. For example, at Salocin Group, data is taken from finance and operations and customer engagements and put directly into our Lakehouse using OneLake shortcuts and Dataflow Gen2. Once there, the data is enhanced with further context and then analysed using either Apache Spark or Microsoft’s t-SQL server.
Once this is completed, as part of the two-way flow of this integration, the data is then sent back to D365 and Customer Insights for real-time activation. This benefits users because it enables faster changes and improved performance, as well as giving them a greater sense of what is working during their campaigns ahead of any prospective campaigns that they look to launch.
Unified customer profiles with Customer Insights-Data and Customer Insights-Journeys
The behavioural, transactional and demographic data stored in Fabric is unified by Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights-Data (CI-D). These profiles create a comprehensive view of each customer. Semantic models are used to build AI-enriched profiles, which allows for data enrichment and segment discovery to be automated. These insights then transfer directly into Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights-Journeys (CI-J), where the marketing activities can begin.
CI-J enables businesses to create bespoke, multi-channel campaigns. Every touch point along the journey is fed back into the Lakehouse. This feedback loop is an essential step – the AI embedded within Fabric identifies the top-performing campaign elements and, from this, recommends any suggestions or optimisations. This closed-loop feedback model allows for businesses to continuously update marketing efforts based on actual outcomes.
Real-time, scalable architecture
Fabric’s native support allows users to react instantly to customer behaviours; this is because they use real-time data via native systems including Eventstreams, Data Activator and streaming APIs. Everything from purchases, support tickets or web interactions, the events flow directly into the Lakehouse for immediate processing and visualisation within Power BI.
Fabric’s AI functionality means that dashboards go beyond just reporting, they also predict the next best actions, which leads to faster and smarter decision making.
Governance, security and cost-efficiency
Microsoft Purview provides built-in governance for Microsoft Fabric. This allows users to secure, label and audit sensitive data. The all-in-one SaaS model reduces any complexities with infrastructure and capacity planning. Putting it all into one platform has led to a significant decrease in total cost of ownership but still means that users can develop data discoverability, as well as have scalable access control.
Introducing Microsoft Fabric Quick Start
As part of our commitment to accelerating data transformation, Salocin Group has developed Microsoft Fabric Quick Start, a guided implementation platform that enables organisations to unlock the full potential of Microsoft’s unified data and analytics ecosystem with speed and confidence.
This Quick Start package includes pre-built pipelines, sample data and dashboards, meaning users can begin utilising Fabric immediately. It’s positioned as a fixed-price service suited for businesses that are looking for a structured path to adopting Fabric, which also sees an immediate ROI.
Why Fabric is the future
Microsoft Fabric is much more than just a data platform – it’s a tool that looks to enable and expand intelligent business operations. Fabric helps Salocin Group close the gap between data engineering and marketing execution, all while delivering real-time informed engagement.
Combining D365, Customer Insights and Power BI with Fabric’s scalable architecture allows us to help teams confidently act on data immediately, whilst remaining secure throughout the process.
If this is something that resonates with you and your business, reach out to our team of data and tech experts. We’d love to connect and talk about how Microsoft Fabric could be the right fit for you.
