Microsoft Fabric

Life Sciences and Consumer Health industry is witnessing a significant shift in recent years. Previously, the focus was primarily on consolidating fragmented data from disparate systems, which hindered seamless access and integration, making it challenging to derive valuable insights.

However, today, we are seeing an increasing number of pharma and med-tech enterprises realizing the importance of investing in their data to derive value out of it and unlock its true potential. Addressing this need, Microsoft Fabric emerges as a multifaceted solution to the industry's data challenges.  

On April 30th, Sonata, in partnership with Microsoft, hosted a bespoke event "A Date with Microsoft Fabric" at New Jersey. The event witnessed a remarkable turnout, attracting many industry leaders from the Life Sciences and Consumer Health space.

During the event, the delegates engaged in thought-provoking discussions centered around deriving value faster from data, leveraging the Fabric Platform. Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of services, including Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, and Data Warehouse to help organizations gain value from their data. Here’s how:

Unified Solution

Fabric integrates data movement, processing, ingestion, transformation, real-time event routing, and report building, simplifying analytics needs.

SaaS Model

Operating on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, Fabric combines components from Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and more into a unified environment.

AI Integration

Fabric embeds AI capabilities, automating integration to transform raw data into actionable insights.

Data Lake Centralization

Fabric’s OneLake centralizes data storage, maintaining data in its original location while enabling preferred analytics tools to access it, streamlining administration and governance.

Through engaging panel discussions and business deep dives, attendees gained insights into leveraging Microsoft Fabric for transformative outcomes. Here are five key takeaways from the conference, which were the major discussion points amongst the attending leaders:

Drug Discovery and Development

The utilization of data analytics and AI can significantly accelerate the drug discovery and development process. By harnessing vast amounts of data from diverse sources, such as semantic literature searches, knowledge bases, and biomedical knowledge corpus, Microsoft Fabric empowers researchers to identify potential drug candidates with clinical viability more efficiently. The integration of AI solutions within the Fabric platform enables researchers to comb through millions of data points, dramatically reducing drug discovery time.

Supply Chain Optimization 

Optimizing supply chain operations, including demand forecasting, inventory management, and distribution logistics, was another prominent topic of discussion amongst the delegates. With enterprise supply chain applications housing complex structured data in various formats and schemas, the Fabric platform provides a unified view and insights across all these disparate datasets. Control towers play a vital role in maintaining supply chain resiliency and extracting valuable insights from multiple enterprise applications, such as ERPs, WMS, TMS, and Planning and Execution systems.

Real-World Evidence (RWE) and Post-Marketing Surveillance

Data lakes can integrate real-world data from various sources, such as electronic health records, wearable devices, and social media, to generate real-world evidence on product efficiency, safety, and consumer behavior. By leveraging AI capabilities, this data can be analyzed to identify potential adverse events and opportunities for product improvements.

Comprehensive Data Governance

To address the unique data governance challenges faced by the healthcare and life sciences industry, Azure Purview and Microsoft Fabric offer a holistic data governance solution. This tailored solution enables organizations to measure outcomes from data governance, ensuring compliance and security. Microsoft Fabric also empowers organizations to govern their sensitive data effectively by enabling real-time access, analysis, and application of governance controls to maintain compliance, improve data quality, and reduce risks. The admin portal offers centralized management of the Fabric estate, allowing administrators to delegate specific aspects of administration and governance to designated scopes, ensuring efficient and secure data governance practices. In summary, Microsoft Fabric enhances data governance by providing a unified view, real-time access, and administrative control over data assets. 

Concerns Around Adoption of Gen AI

In general, the adoption of AI in Life Sciences and Consumer Health encounters multifaceted challenges in quality, accessibility, and affordability of health systems, particularly in regions where there is a shortage of medical professionals. AI offers a solution to enhance healthcare access and quality. Another challenge in adopting AI is ensuring data quality and interoperability among AI models to perform effectively, as they heavily depend on accurate and consistent data. Moreover, navigating ethical and legal issues such as data sharing, privacy, and consent presents complex challenges that require a delicate balance between safeguarding patient privacy and leveraging data for valuable insights.

While leaders in the industry are eager to embrace Gen AI for improved member, patient, and provider experiences, along with increased productivity and reduced administrative costs, they also expressed concerns about its adoption during the event. It was highlighted that Gen AI is still a human-led process, and critical decisions must be carefully evaluated and monitored by professionals. Healthcare professionals may also resist adopting new technologies due to lack of training or familiarity.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Microsoft Fabric offers a powerful solution to overcome the data challenges faced by the healthcare industry. However, implementing and harnessing its full potential requires expertise and guidance. Over the past 18 months, Sonata has been collaborating closely with the Fabric team, recognizing the platform's potential to revolutionize data modernization.

If you're seeking to modernize your data infrastructure on Fabric, contact Sonata. Because, at Sonata, we provide a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking to modernize their data infrastructure on Fabric, leveraging the power of AI and automation for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

In recent years, the Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) industry have experienced significant transformations, driven by the convergence of Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This convergence has reshaped various aspects of the industry, including patient care management, clinical decision-making processes, research endeavors, and operational efficiency.

The global AI in healthcare market is making waves, reaching an estimated size of $19.27 billion in 2023. Furthermore, it's expected to grow at a rapid rate of 38.5% from 2024 to 2030, thus promising to revolutionize the industry. This growth is driven by healthcare organizations recognizing the importance of improving efficiency, accuracy, and better patient outcomes. A study by Microsoft and IDC in March 2024 found that 79% of healthcare organizations are already using AI technology.

Modern Data and AI platforms are at the forefront of this revolutionary transformation, unlocking a world of new possibilities for improving patient outcomes, expediting scientific breakthroughs, and reshaping healthcare delivery paradigms. By investing in Data and AI, organizations operating within these sectors can drive innovation, foster collaboration, save cost, and make a significant impact on the health and well-being of individuals. In fact, the return on investment (ROI) is realized within 14 months, generating $3.20 for every $1 invested in AI.

Healthcare's Key Data Challenges

The healthcare industry is characterized by the complexity, sensitivity, and strict regulations surrounding its data. While the potential of modern data and AI platforms is undeniable, healthcare organizations must navigate a complex landscape to fully realize their benefits. Here are some key challenges that the healthcare industry faces:

Data Silos

Fragmented data across disparate systems hinder seamless access and integration, making it difficult to extract valuable insights.

Data Quality

Ensuring data quality and safeguarding sensitive patient information against cyberattacks remain as ongoing struggles.

Regulatory Compliance

Compliance with various regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR, adds another layer of complexity, necessitating robust governance frameworks.

Interoperability

The lack of standardization complicates the interoperability of data exchange among different healthcare systems and devices.

Actionable Insights & Scalability

Extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data requires advanced analytics capabilities. Scalability challenges arise with the exponential growth of data, especially with the adoption of digital health technologies.

Balancing Innovation & Responsibility

Striking a balance between data-driven innovation, ethical principles, and regulatory compliance is important. But this might pose further complexities that demand careful consideration and collaboration among stakeholders.

Despite 95% of healthcare executives prioritizing digital transformation, the lack of data readiness is preventing them from making permanent changes. To effectively address these obstacles, it is crucial to have robust technology capabilities supported by governance frameworks and solid infrastructure.

Healthcare Solutions by Microsoft Fabric

Enter Microsoft Fabric – an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the necessary data and analytics tools organizations need. Fabric goes beyond generic solutions by offering industry-specific capabilities designed to address the unique challenges faced by HLS industry.  By tailoring data solutions to the specific needs of the healthcare industry, Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and achieve optimal results.

When combined with Healthcare industry solutions, Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities to build a robust Data and AI platform tailored to address the challenges mentioned above. Healthcare data solutions within Microsoft Fabric provide an holistic, analytics SaaS platform that enables organizations to ingest, store, and analyze healthcare data from various sources, including electronic health records, picture archiving, communication systems, and more.

Enterprises can expedite their time-to-value by leveraging Microsoft Fabric's healthcare industry solutions. The platform allows organizations to efficiently manage the complexities of healthcare data and harness the transformative potential of Data and AI-driven insights. The below is a reference architecture how these components come together to form a cohesive solution.

Data Ingestion

With native connectors like Fabric Data Factory and Azure Health Data Services (FHIR Datasets), organizations can easily ingest a wide array of data from disparate sources into OneLake storage within Microsoft Fabric. OneLake serves as a unified data management solution, efficiently storing large volumes of data, breaking down silos, and offering cost-effective storage. It is seamlessly integrated into every Microsoft Fabric tenant, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure management

Data Management

Implement the medallion architecture pattern using Microsoft OneLake and Lakehouse capabilities. This architecture pattern involves organizing data across three layers: Bronze (Raw), Silver (Curated and Augmented), and Gold (Business-level Aggregated) layers (Lakehouse) to facilitate seamless data processing and analytics. This multi-layered approach establishes a single source of truth for enterprise data products. The lakehouse architecture in Microsoft Fabric combines both Data Lakes and Data Warehouses, storing data in open file format (delta-parquet) and this enables to run large-scale analytics workloads in a cost-effective manner.

Data Engineering

Leverage Microsoft Fabric's Synapse Data Engineering Notebooks (Apache Spark-based), Fabric Data Factory, Synapse Realtime Analytics capabilities to develop scalable data pipelines. These pipelines consolidate and transform data according to target data domains and analytics data stores, aligning with industry-standard data models (e.g. FHIR). This ensures interoperability and adherence to industry standards.

Analytics and Insights

To access and derive actionable insights from healthcare data within Microsoft Fabric, organizations can utilize familiar tools such as Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse SQL-endpoint, Synapse Data Science Notebooks, Power BI (with copilot), and Azure OpenAI Services. Examples include patient cohort analysis, risk stratification models, and longitudinal patient view, empowering organization make informed decision-making and driving innovations.

Platform Operationalization

Integrate Azure DevOps capabilities seamlessly with Microsoft Fabric to automate and streamline the operationalization of data platforms. This integration enables faster delivery of changes, improved reliability, and enhanced collaboration among development, operations, and data teams, ensuring efficient data platform management and evolution.

Comprehensive Data Governance

Azure Purview and Microsoft Fabric together provide a holistic data governance solution tailored for the healthcare and life sciences industry. This solution enables organizations to establish and enforce robust data governance standards and processes, ensuring data privacy, regulatory compliance, and data quality. By leveraging these technologies, organizations can harness the full potential of their data, driving innovation, improving patient outcomes, and maintaining the highest standards of data governance and security.

Microsoft Fabric offers a powerful solution for the data challenges plaguing the healthcare industry. It enables seamless integration, efficient data management, and innovative patient engagement features. But implementing and harnessing its full potential requires expertise. Sonata played a pivotal role in the development of Microsoft Fabric and were honored to be its Featured and Launch Partner. Our team possesses deep industry knowledge and extensive experience in crafting customized solutions for the unique problems faced by healthcare organizations. Contact Sonata today to discuss how we can help you leverage this powerful platform to achieve your digital transformation goals.

In today's healthcare landscape, payers and hospitals are faced with the challenge of managing and utilizing vast amounts of disparate data from various sources. However, only a fraction of this data is actually usable at any given time. To put the scale of healthcare data into perspective, the World Economic Forum highlights a staggering fact: hospitals generate approximately 50 petabytes of isolated data annually. And surprisingly, about 80% of this data is unstructured thereby withholding valuable insights.

Real-time data insights are crucial for enhancing patient care and aiding payers and providers, particularly for elderly and critical care patients. One of the biggest challenges for payers and customers alike is the ever-increasing cost of healthcare. Providing the right care along with the value has become primary driver for the industry. All this can become possible only when data flows seamlessly, yet secured.

The Solution Fabric

In the swiftly evolving healthcare technology landscape, Microsoft is setting a new benchmark with its latest innovation: Microsoft Fabric for the Healthcare Industry. This transformative technology promises to revolutionize how healthcare providers manage data, collaborate, and deliver patient care. As we approach the official unveiling of Microsoft Fabric at the upcoming event by Sonata Software, anticipation is building among healthcare professionals and IT experts alike. Here's what we can expect from this groundbreaking technology.

A New Era of Integration and Interoperability

The commitment to seamless integration and interoperability is at the heart of Microsoft Fabric for the Healthcare Industry. Healthcare payers & providers often grapple with siloed information systems that hinder efficient data exchange and collaboration. According to a report, the lack of data analytics hinders innovation and contributes to the administrative complexity that’s linked to more than $265 billion in unnecessary annual healthcare spending in the United States.

Microsoft Fabric aims to bridge these gaps, offering a unified platform by adopting FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Exchange) and OMOP (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership) as a standard for exchanging patient information that ensures secure and smooth communication between healthcare systems and devices.

Sonata enhances the implementation with NLP Driven Industry Catalog, Pre-mapping with SAAS systems/Industry data model, Self-Healing Data Operations suite.

Enhanced Data Management and Analysis

Data is the lifeblood of modern healthcare, driving everything from personalized treatment plans to epidemiological research. The global healthcare analytics market size was valued at USD 43.1 billion in 2023 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.1% from 2024 to 2030.

Microsoft Fabric leverages cutting-edge data management and analysis tools to help healthcare organizations harness the full potential of their data. With advanced analytics and AI capabilities, providers can gain deeper insights into patient health, improve diagnostic accuracy, and develop more effective treatment strategies.

Sonata helps in faster setup of Fabric with insights Driven Engineering Model, Automated Data and Pipelines Migrations.

Empowering Patient-Centered Care

Microsoft Fabric places a strong emphasis on supporting patient-centered care. The platform is designed to facilitate easier access to health records, enabling patients to take a more active role in their health management. Additionally, by streamlining communication channels between patients and providers with its ‘Patient outreach analytics’ Microsoft Fabric ensures that patients can receive timely and personalized care, enhancing overall patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Bolstering Security and Compliance

In the digital age, the security and privacy of health information are paramount. About 725 healthcare data breaches were reported to OCR in 2023. Microsoft Fabric is built with robust security measures to protect sensitive health data against cyber threats. Furthermore, the platform is designed to comply with healthcare regulations and standards, ensuring that organizations can meet their legal and ethical obligations while leveraging the benefits of digital innovation.

What to Expect at the Upcoming Event

The upcoming event promises to be a milestone occasion, offering attendees a firsthand look at Microsoft Fabric's capabilities and potential impact on the healthcare industry. Participants can expect:

• Live Demonstrations: Witness the power and versatility of Microsoft Fabric through live demos showcasing its integration, data management, and patient engagement features.
• Expert Insights: Hear from Microsoft executives and leading healthcare professionals about the vision behind Microsoft Fabric and its role in shaping the future of healthcare technology.
• Collaborative Opportunities: Engage with peers, industry experts from Sonata and Microsoft to explore collaborative initiatives and learn how Microsoft Fabric can be tailored to meet specific organizational needs.

Conclusion

As we stand on the cusp of a new digital era in healthcare, Microsoft Fabric represents a pivotal step forward in our quest to enhance healthcare delivery, patient outcomes, and data-driven decision-making. The upcoming event is more than just a showcase; it's a glimpse into the future of healthcare, illuminated by the promise of technological innovation. Contact Sonata for an assessment to adopt Fabric faster or inquire about Sonata's assistance with Fabric adoption in decentralized and disconnected data environments. Stay tuned, as we embark on this exciting journey together, unlocking the potential of Microsoft Fabric for the healthcare industry.

Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) companies find themselves at an inflection point, driven by various macro factors including anemic pipelines, intense competition, rise of personalized medicine, medication affordability, pricing pressures, and increasing cost of operations.  A vast majority of HLS companies are embracing digital transformation as a key strategic lever to address these challenges and gain competitive advantage. While data is central to AI-driven digital transformation, HLS companies face significant challenge on that front. 

The HLS Data Challenge

The healthcare industry alone generates 30% of global data volumes and is trending higher. This massive data volume challenge is compounded by other issues such as - legacy data silos, data quality, interoperability, privacy and security, and global regulatory compliance.  These data challenges directly contribute to increased total cost of ownership (TCO), lack of real-time insights, absence of a single version of truth across the organization, expensive data engineering, and limited AI opportunities.

With a well-crafted data management strategy and platform, HLS organizations can unlock the power of data and gain valuable insights to optimize new drug development, achieve operational efficiencies, and improve patient outcomes.

Here's where Microsoft Fabric and Healthcare Cloud steps in.

Fabric can be leveraged to address data and analytics challenges and drive digital transformation across the value chain. To comprehend the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, first, let’s understand what Fabric is and what it can do.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, an all-in-one analytics solution that offers a comprehensive suite of services from ingestion to insights on a unified platform. Through a layer of abstraction and One Lake architecture, Fabric provides an integrated view of enterprise data regardless of the source or storage.  It helps users to seamlessly access enterprise data to build real-time analytics, or enables data engineers to build data pipelines without the need for extensive ETL workloads.

Microsoft Fabric's industry-specific capabilities provide a powerful framework to address challenges head-on. By customizing data solutions, organizations can unlock new opportunities, drive innovation, and achieve optimal outcomes.

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Having introduced Microsoft Fabric as an integrated suite of tools that unifies data, applications, and services across the healthcare ecosystem, let's now delve into its game-changing aspect: Healthcare Cloud, a powerful platform that can transform the healthcare journey.

What is Microsoft Healthcare Cloud? 

Microsoft Healthcare Cloud, built on Microsoft Fabric, is an industry solution designed specifically for life sciences and healthcare. It’s a unifying platform that brings together the entire healthcare ecosystem to improve clinical and operational outcomes. Within the healthcare cloud, Microsoft provides sample datasets (FHIR, SDOH), pre-defined mappings, connectors, and pipelines to help create a unified view of disparate AI-ready data. By leveraging the Healthcare Cloud, organizations can operate within a secure, compliant, and scalable environment, ensuring data privacy, promoting interoperability, and facilitating seamless collaboration.

Let’s now explore how Microsoft Fabric and the Healthcare Cloud can facilitate digital transformation across the HLS value chain.

Drug Discovery: Microsoft Fabric's ability to house data from various sources, including semantic literature searches, knowledge bases, and biomedical knowledge corpus, empowers researchers to identify lead molecules with clinical viability more efficiently. By leveraging AI solutions within Microsoft Fabric, researchers can comb through millions of data points, dramatically reducing drug discovery time.

Synthetic clinical trial data: Traditional placebo-based clinical trials, especially in case of rare and chronic diseases, can create ethical issues due to the rarity of subjects. Microsoft's Healthcare Cloud, with its built-in FHIR data model, enables the easy ingestion and storage of large amounts of patient data. This data can then be used to generate synthetic clinical trial data that mimics real patient data, without any data privacy and ethical concerns while facilitating research and analysis.

Healthcare Data Interoperability: Data interoperability presents several challenges including lack of robust longitudinal view and analysis of patient records. Pre-built mapping between FIHR and OMAP CDM makes is easy to ingest and run analytics and prediction on longitudinal patient records.

SDOH Datasets: Healthcare Cloud provides access to Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) datasets, which is crucial in improving population health outcomes. These data sets combined with other information could yield valuable insights into identifying viable clinical trial sites and subjects.

Control Towers for Resilient Supply Chains: Enterprise supply chain applications are complex structure data in a variety of formats and schemas. Control towers play a vital role in maintaining supply chain resiliency and draw insights from several enterprise applications including, ERPs, WMS, TMS, Planning and Execution systems etc.  Fabric can provide a unified view and insights across all these disparate datasets.

Customer Centricity: Customers often have various queries that require real-time responses, ranging from product shipment status to return processes. Addressing these queries necessitates gathering data from multiple systems and providing the required answers. With a unified data view from Fabric, AI can generate the required information in real-time directly to customers through a self-service portal or to customer service representatives interacting with them.

Predictive Plant Maintenance: Unplanned production downtime is very expensive and disruptive. By leveraging data streams from IoT sensors and hubs, Fabric can ingest and analyze this data in real-time to identify failure patterns. In the case of equipment failure prediction, appropriate remediations and preventive actions can be taken.

Regulatory compliance: Life sciences companies often generate periodic reports and submit them to regulatory authorities to ensure compliance. These reports require data from various applications such as Regulatory Information Management (RIM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS), Pharmacovigilance (PV), and more. Fabric offers a unified view of these disparate datasets, ready for AI to generate reports in real-time. This eliminates the need for expensive Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and data integration efforts.

By leveraging a unified SaaS platform like Microsoft Fabric, healthcare companies can unlock valuable insights across various areas, including clinical summarization, medication adherence dashboards, quality metric reporting, enabling risk predictions, and performing clinical research. Microsoft Fabric and Healthcare Cloud offer a unified SaaS platform that enables the processing of large volumes of disparate datasets, from data ingestion to generating actionable insights. This solution has the potential to become an enterprise data backbone, serving as the foundation for multiple industry use cases for business users, data engineers, data scientists, and clinical and operational teams.

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric: Real-World Story

Since 2023, Microsoft has been actively testing healthcare data solutions within Microsoft Fabric and gathering feedback from its customers. One notable organization exploring these solutions is the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. With an annual total extramural research support of $524 million and a faculty of over 2,000 full-time members, they are leveraging healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to power their Colorectal Cancer Multi-Modal Data Commons.  

By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, the university is accelerating their efforts to unify data from various sources to create an ecosystem that enables secure, ethical, and reproducible data management and analytics. This will further drive innovative clinical and translational research for the promotion of health in Wisconsin and beyond.

Microsoft Fabric offers a powerful solution for the data challenges plaguing the healthcare industry. But implementing and harnessing its full potential requires expertise. Sonata played a pivotal role in the development of Microsoft Fabric and were honored to be its Featured and Launch Partner. Our team possesses deep industry knowledge and extensive experience in crafting customized solutions for the unique problems faced by healthcare organizations. Contact Sonata today to discuss how we can help you leverage this powerful platform to achieve your digital transformation goals.

About the Author: Sujan Thanjavuru is a thought leader with 25 years of industry and enterprise transformation expertise. He specializes in driving end-to-end digital transformation across the value chain and is a trusted advisor to our clients. He heads the Life Sciences domain practice at Sonata.

We are thrilled to witness general availability announcement of Microsoft Fabric today! This also marks 1 year of amazing journey with Microsoft Fabric. Thanks to product engineering, partner & field teams and internal implementation teams at Microsoft, customers and prospects who engaged with us on early evaluations, pilots and brainstorming; this has really helped Sonata in early learning & adoption, contributing to the product, develop subject matter experts, building our offerings and accelerators.

Excited to be a featured partner for Microsoft Fabric!

Fabric featured partner page

Fabric GA blog by Arun Ulag

Enterprises have already started realizing the immense need of complete and high quality, connected data ecosystem for AI innovations to succeed.

Providing connected data foundation for analytics and AI to our customers is a key focus area for us. Microsoft Fabric provides a perfect technology stack to achieve this.

Real world objects are inherently interrelated. For a true reflection and complete insights, data need to be connected too.

Silos of information can’t provide real world reflections. Because real world entities and events have complex and many-to-many relationship. Insights gathered, inferences derived or AI predictions from silo datasets are at the risk of being inaccurate, incomplete, or impossible!

Here is an example. A retail store chain struggled to estimate their assembled product delivery date to customers at the time of order. Analytics specialists experimented with number of forecasting models to predict the order fulfilment and delivery estimates with limited success.

One of key challenges that prevented the predictability is disconnected information systems. This is a quite common challenge among the enterprises and bridging the silos is often a complex and time-consuming project. Reflecting an integrated picture of the business is key to solving such issues.

Building connected data model for each use case will be time consuming and expensive.

When there are several such needs, implementing integrations for each use case will be slow and expensive. Building connected data foundation on a SaaS platform like Microsoft Fabric is a very relevant solution to solve multiple such challenges quickly and cost-effectively.

Is lack of connected information system the only problem here? In the above example, where the product delivery involved assembling various components from existing inventory or from procurement channels, finding nearest or fastest sources of the parts, shipment routes, predictability of order fulfilment is dependent on variability of many sub-processes. It could appear to be process related challenge but connected data and insights has significant role to play in those sub-processes too. For example:

1. Unpredictable demands
2. Complex supply chain processes.

Demand prediction involves customer and market intelligence. Connecting complex supply chain process involves connecting their data in a business domain context.

Predictability often involves data universe beyond the organizational boundary.

Predicting product demands requires customer intelligence, market intelligence, competition, pricing, discounts and many more. Product or brand’s social sentiment can bring a drastic change in the demand too. Most of these are not internal data sources. Expanding the scope of information and intelligence hence becomes essential to solving some of the key business problems. This is where, what seems to be not related to information challenge, is actually related to it.

Building data mesh is a great way to connect disparate datasets while they physically can’t be all integrated or stored together.

Fabric brings number of key features necessary to build connected data mesh.

Plugging in required dataset into contexts – internal or external through connectors or shortcuts helps quickly build a mesh.

• Shortcuts across workspaces in Fabric allows intra-company datasets connected.
• Cross-platform shortcuts and rich set of data connectors in Fabric allows building an enterprise data model beyond the boundary of technology and systems stack.
• Sonata’s Lightning Data Suite further helps map the datasets into connected domain models and intelligently identify potential relationship across the disparate datasets. More on this in the last section of this blog
• Fabric’s focus is on enabling open and connected data ecosystem. Specialized features such as Synapse Link for Dataverse further simplify and speed up data integration into OneLake.

Connecting business processes involve connecting their data in a business domain context

While connecting datasets coming from supply chain, inventory locations, product part compatibility, pricing and shipment information, relationship between these datasets would seem really complex and hard to define unless they are put into a context of an integrated domain context. Hence, domain modeling is an important aspect of building a connected data foundation.

There are more reasons for organizing data into a connected domain models

1. Domain model simplifies self-service analytics
2. It broadens the audience for usage of data and helps adoption & ROI
3. Improves usage of co-pilot and NLP based data exploration
4. Reduces load on Engineering teams so that they can focus on more innovations and new build rather than getting caught up into fulfilling ad hoc insight needs
5. Greatly improves agility. Users could get their insights in seconds rather than waiting on SME team to deliver it through build cycles
6. Improves role experience by providing relevant perspectives of the enterprise data model
7. Improves security. Fragmented data pieces could fall through the loopholes. Data entities well mapped to the functional domain can be better secured and governed.

Sonata’s domain data model approach is precisely for building that business friendly data structure on a connected data mesh in Fabric platform.

Build connected data foundation using Sonata’s Lightning Data Suite (LDS) for Fabric

LDS connects data silos in many ways.

1. Domain data models bring functional connections among system generated silos.
2. Intelligent mappings connect source data structures to domain models
3. Labeling & tagging, label classifications and keyword synonyms establish similarity
4. Semantic connector discover hidden connections across structured & unstructured data elements

Vision of Lightning Data Suite is to optimize data engineering and sustenance effort in order to leverage more bandwidth towards deriving insights and AI innovations. LDS brings capabilities necessary to build connected data foundation faster.

Domain data dictionary

This transforms system data model to business-friendly semantic data model for analytics and co-pilot, natural language querying and summarization in Fabric Power BI

Automatic Data Pipelines

Using the business dictionary-based metadata, LDS Automatic data pipeline does the job of hundreds of typical data flows or data pipelines that ingest data into data lake and build delta parquet based Lakehouse tables in Fabric.

Semantic connector

Connected data ecosystem is not only about bringing datasets from heterogeneous systems and sources; unless the datasets are meaningfully connected, real data mesh is not formed. LDS Semantic connector intelligently establishes relationships across heterogenous datasets coming together into OneLake.

Sonata LDS also brings various horizontal and vertical use case solutions based on our market research of key gaps and pain-points.

We are helping customers globally with their Fabric based data modernization journey.

We have been doing Fabric briefing sessions to help enterprise stakeholders explore what is in Fabric and how it helps with data modernization. For an enterprise to take a step back and revisit data strategy for the era of transformations with AI, customers leverage joint envisioning sessions. For further deep dive analysis of applicability and validate the possibilities with Fabric based solutions, we provide assessment and Proof of concept services. Data modernization using Sonata’s lightning data suite helps modern enterprise realize business friendly, connected data foundation on Fabric for agile and cost-efficient data modernization.

Behalf of team Sonata, I sincerely thank our early adoption customers for their invaluable questions and inputs, Microsoft Fabric Product Engineering teams for all the guidance and collaboration, Microsoft Field teams for joint GTM efforts and partnership, Microsoft internal solution implementation teams for the opportunity and collaborative early adoption programs. This has helped us in building specializations, co-create and add value to Fabric product ecosystem. Past 12 months of journey with Microsoft Fabric has been amazing and we are looking forward to delivering customer success through innovative data modernization solutions on Microsoft Fabric.

Related links:

• Microsoft partner blog
• Microsoft blog page