Integrating ISV Apps with Microsoft Fabric: A World of New Possibilities
Since the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, an open platform, the interest and excitement amongst Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) has been tremendous. Last year at Microsoft Ignite, we shared why ISVs should build on Fabric as well as the paths to integrating with Fabric.
ISVs have been actively engaging with several capabilities available in private preview to create innovative experiences and enhance their existing applications. The feedback received has been overwhelmingly positive. Today, at Microsoft Build, we are thrilled to unveil the latest developments that ISVs can utilize to drive innovation and provide unparalleled value to their customers.
The paths to integrating with Microsoft Fabric
There are 3 paths for ISVs to integrate with Fabric. Starting with simply reading and writing to OneLake, the foundation of Fabric, all the way to a more involved approach – building a completely native workload within Fabric. Each integration path has various new capabilities now available.
1. Inter-operate with Fabric:
At the core, OneLake uses the open table format DeltaLake and all Fabric workloads can read and write to it.
But many ISVs have customers with other table formats. And today we announce that Apache Iceberg table format is coming soon! This allows ISVs to choose their format of choice for customers. We are committed to our principle of open data, and this is one more step further to move away from walled gardens to data that is open and interoperable for our customers and ISVs.
There are various approaches to integrate with OneLake as shown below.
While developers at ISVs can use a range of OneLake APIs to support different use cases, Shortcut APIs are now available and in addition, OneLake supports S3-compatible sources as well. This means that data from a range of object stores that support S3 protocol can also be integrated into OneLake across multiple clouds.
One of the capabilities that data-centric ISVs are particularly excited about is the Fabric External Data Sharing capability. This allows data-rich ISVs that share data across Fabric tenants to their customers and even monetize their data assets. End-customers can also share data via shares with the ISV driving increased data collaboration.
2. Develop Apps on Fabric:
Organizations and application providers continue to build experience and apps including highly advanced SaaS multi-tenant analytics applications on Fabric using the Data Warehouse APIs, Data Factory APIs and more. This is a pattern many ISVs are leveraging and one in particular we’d like to highlight is Adobe.
Adobe and Microsoft are expanding our existing relationship. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Campaign will have the ability to federate enterprise data from Microsoft Fabric. Our joint customers will soon have the capability to connect to Microsoft Fabric and use the Fabric Data Warehouse for query federation to create and enrich audiences for engagement, without having to transfer or extract the data from Fabric.
Along with our existing APIs, we continue to innovate and add new and improved capabilities our customers and ISVs can use and extend their applications.
What’s exciting is that now along with data at rest, you can seamlessly integrate data in motion with the introduction of Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric.
Customers have more and more real-time data coming from IoT systems, telemetry, cloud applications, and more. It’s notoriously hard to work with, but with Fabric we’re making it very easy for everyone to unlock actionable insights out of this data. ISVs can now leverage this to build unique experiences with both data at rest and in motion. Learn more about this in the tech blog.
In addition, an API for GraphQL is now available in Fabric that makes it seamless to query several different analytical data sources – lakehouses, warehouses, mirrored databases and develop rich data-driven applications and experiences.
Also announced at Build is the new User Data Functions (UDF) capability, which allows developers to add custom business logic within Fabric in C# or Python and access it within Pipelines and other Fabric items. These also come with an endpoint that can be called directly from applications. Learn more hereabout UDFs in this blog.
3. Build a Fabric workload:
At Ignite, we announced partnerships with a set of design partners to build native Fabric workloads. Today, at Build, we are thrilled to announce that the Fabric workload development kit is now available in Public Preview for ISVs allowing them to build their own Fabric workloads.
This opens up an enormous opportunity for our partners to create a new channel for a SaaS experience and reach a much wider audience for their products and tools. Using the new Dev Kit for Fabric, ISVs can acquire new customers by providing a fully integrated workload in Fabric. The ISV workloads will provide a seamless experience with the rest of Fabric and works directly on top of the data in OneLake. All Fabric customers can easily discover and try the ISV workload in the new Fabric Workload Hub and transact directly in the Azure marketplace.
Announcing Private Preview Workloads: A Sneak Peek into the Future
We’re also thrilled to announce the private preview of many partner workloads using the new Workload development kit.
SAS, Esri, Informatica, Teradata, Neo4J and Profisee – we are excited to announce that each of these will soon introduce a Fabric-native workload for our joint customers. Each of these experiences add value to users by enabling them to take advantage of the industry-leading technology and capabilities of these ISVs all within the Fabric platform.
Here are all the workloads that will soon be in Private Preview and available for you try out.
The SAS Decision Builder workload enables users to construct business rules and decisioning flows to make intelligent decisions on data in OneLake. Sign up for the private preview for SAS Decision Builder coming soon to learn more.
The Esri Geospatial Analytics workload enables users to unlock the potential of location data using a range of reliable spatial functions and tools via the Fabric Data Science notebooks. You can sign up for the private preview coming soon here.
The Informatica Data Quality workload in Fabric will enable users to profile and improve data quality for data stored in OneLake all natively within Fabric via a SaaS experience. The private preview is coming soon. Sign up here!
The Teradata AI Unlimited workload will also be in private preview soon. Sign up here for more details. It will provide our joint users the ability to use the powerful Teradata analytics engine including the over 150 built-in functions in an on-demand workload service with read and write to OneLake.
The Neo4J Graph Analytics workload will enable users to create Graph models on data in OneLake, analyze Graph data, run Graph Data Science Algorithms using Neo4j Bloom, and write back results into OneLake for a seamless end-to-end integration all within Fabric. The private preview will be available soon.
The Profisee Master Data Management workload will enable user to effortlessly match, merge, standardize & verify data to create Master Data Projects with ease all within Microsoft Fabric. This workload will also be available soon in Private Preview.
This is just the beginning of our journey. We have already partnered with many more ISVs to extend their experiences to OneLake, develop new applications using Fabric’s rich workload APIs, and build native experiences within Fabric.
With the Public Preview of the Fabric Workload Development Kit, we invite developers from all ISVs and industries to join us in innovating and bringing rich SaaS experiences to Fabric. By leveraging Fabric’s extensive reach, discoverability, instant access to the customer’s data estate, and strong community, you can drive growth. A world of new possibilities has opened up, and we hope you will join us in bringing rich workloads to our joint users.
