Data-driven transformation: Successful Microsoft Fabric implementation with Wipfli

Partner Audience: #CSP #Services
Relevant to: #SuccessStory #GeneratePipeline #Azure

Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive data and analytics platform designed to help organizations democratize data, share insights, and drive data-driven decision-making. Fabric presents Microsoft partners with the opportunity to provide leading analytics capabilities to customers in a SaaS solution, and at a price point that resonates with customers in the small and medium enterprise range. Leverage Fabric to help your customers improve data literacy and drive business.

Let’s look at a successful implementation by one of our partners.

Anatomy of a partner win

Microsoft partner Wipfli is a seasoned digital and business services consulting firm that delivers integrated solutions to help organizations transform through digital innovation. Microsoft Fabric fits well with Wipfli’s strategic “listen and learn before we advise” approach, having completed implementations of Microsoft Fabric to simplify, unify, and accelerate their customers’ digital transformation journey.

The challenge

In a recent customer deployment, Wipfli was working with a customer in the nonprofit industry that was having difficulty measuring the impact and effectiveness of their programs across disparate locations. The customer was actively using Microsoft Power BI, but they hadn’t seen widespread adoption across the organization and were looking for a more comprehensive solution. The decentralized nature of the business resulted in siloed data that required extensive data cleansing and made broader performance and production reporting difficult, labor-intensive, and inconsistent.

Additionally, the customer’s limited infrastructure support team was burdened with extensive data engineering work for Azure SQL and other Microsoft data tools without a cohesive data strategy in place, which resulted in fluctuating, unpredictable costs.

They needed a solution that would provide centralization and visualization, while capitalizing on existing investments.

The considerations

Wipfli went to work developing a strategic data foundation roadmap to meet their customer’s needs. The customer had existing investments in Microsoft technology (PowerBI, Azure SQL Server Database, Azure Data Factory) and was looking for options that would limit total implementation costs.

Wipfli knew that part of the project would entail building out a centralized data hub to allow all the customer’s locations to leverage and access a single data source. A centralized hub would better support local reporting and analytics, along with several automated reporting and benchmarking capabilities for different business groups.

 “Fabric is specifically designed to bring information together, centralize how you manage data, standardize how you structure it for reporting, create a single source of truth, and then report off that one source of truth instead of a number of different siloes,” says Matt Sabo, Director of Analytics Delivery at Wipfli.

Microsoft Fabric was the right tool for the job. Fabric is also able to support the need for diverse system integrations with its multitude of community partnerships through OneLake, a consolidated data repository that can leverage and allow queries across all data types, both structured and unstructured.

The sales win

Wipfli proposed Microsoft Fabric as a comprehensive data management and analytics platform to help streamline costs and utilization of Azure toolsets while consolidating, managing, and analyzing data all in one place. Fabric also provides simplicity and predictable pricing by “bundling” tools that the customer was already using with new capabilities. The customer would avoid having to manage usage and costs of each individual component.

Wipfli also used as a selling point the customer’s existing Power BI Premium investment automatically transferring to support Fabric workloads.

“That’s part of what has made this a really easy conversation,” recounts Dean Roder, Director of Alliances at Wipfli. “We’re able to show them, here’s this new consolidated set of tools you were already using and paying for, with added functionality and simpler management, and you don’t have to buy anything additional or swap anything out. It was a really easy ‘yes’ for them.”

To empower its diverse organization with access to consolidated datasets and insights to improve reporting, decision-making, and experiences, Wipfli used their “Level-Up initiative” to digitally transform their data estate and ensure that the implementation was successful.  Delivering technology requires training customers and ensuring that stakeholders are able to make the most of their investment.

The implementation

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric to transform the customer’s data estate is accelerating the delivery time for Wipfli by roughly 20 percent (as compared to previous customer implementations using Azure PaaS solutions), with less effort spent on data engineering and navigating complications.

Fabric is also much simpler to manage and administer than individual tooling, enabling the customer to adopt a powerful data management and analytics platform without staffing a high-cost IT specialist.

“Microsoft took all the tools we love the most and use all the time and put them together in a perfectly aligned, engineered framework with a simplified pricing model and made our lives a lot easier in doing what we need to do,” remarks Sabo.

“They don’t need to have someone who understands all the working components of the individual Azure products, they only have to learn one thing—Fabric, and how to manage it. Everything is lined up to work together so it makes it much easier for them.”

Furthermore, Fabric creates an ideal foundation to facilitate future artificial intelligence (AI) vector models and queries as their data maturity progresses.

“I really think it’s amazing that Microsoft can make something like this, a best-in-class platform for cloud data management, attainable for a non-profit like Junior Achievement. Fabric is providing an easy, affordable path for companies that already have a PowerBI Premium license to bring a lot of tools together for even greater capability. You’re getting a database, data science, real-time analytics—it really delivers a lot of value for the money,” remarks Sabo.

Next steps

Interested in learning more about Microsoft Fabric? Get started with Microsoft Fabric or register for a virtual technical workshop live event on June 11-13, 2024.

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

Tags: #Azure, #CSP, #GeneratePipeline, #ServicesPartners, #SuccessStory