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Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the Asia Pacific region face many challenges in managing and leveraging their data. In this blog, we explore how Microsoft Fabric supports the journey to data-led businesses, and how our partners can leverage its capabilities to enhance client offerings, drive innovation and achieve cost savings.
The Future of Unified Data Analytics is Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is a cutting-edge platform for unifying data management, analytics, and governance. An all-in-one software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Microsoft Fabric integrates data lake, data engineering, data integration, analytics, and business intelligence into a single platform.
This unified approach allows organisations to break down silos and unify data from multiple sources—including multi-cloud and third-party data – to create a scalable environment for data-led decision-making across all parts of a business.
For MSPs and CSPs, Fabric provides the means to drive customer value with a data platform that spans data integration, governance, and advanced analytics—all with the reliability and scalability of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Why consider Microsoft Fabric for your SMB customers?
To understand the potential of Fabric, let’s turn to findings from a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, which highlights how Fabric is shown to deliver measurable benefits to businesses.
Interviews conducted by Forrester with organisations using Microsoft Fabric quantified the following benefits:
1. 20% productivity boost for business analysts.
Savings of $4.8million generated for one company over three years through reduced time on data preparation, increased speed of data insight production, and increased quality of the insights used to underpin business decision making.
2. $3.6m direct contribution to business results.
Another company leveraged its access to faster, higher quality insights into decisions that added millions to revenue growth.
3. 25% technical productivity gains.
The TEI report offers hard evidence of how using Fabric to standardise data from various sources, including third-party and multi-cloud data, boosted data engineering productivity by 25% and saved $1.8m.
4. Infrastructure Cost Removal
With Fabric in place, one company was able to consolidate its data tools and decommission legacy systems, saving $779,000.
5. Reduced talent attrition
In another highly relevant example, the TEI report shows that implementing Fabric resulted in another company reducing talent attrition by 8%, due to increased job satisfaction. This saved the business $1.4m.
Beyond these direct, measurable gains, the TEI report also highlights how access to new datasets and ease of working with complex data encourages greater creativity, collaboration and skills amongst analysts and engineers.
Use of Fabric was also shown to support improved alignment between technical and business teams, including more coherent and cohesive approaches to data automation and governance.
Microsoft Fabric is a versatile and powerful data analytics management system that can be applied to meet the diverse needs of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the Asia Pacific region.
It is designed to scale with the growth of SMBs. Whether a business has fewer than 10 employees or thousands, Fabric can accommodate increasing data volumes and complexity. Its flexible architecture allows businesses to start small and expand their usage as needed, ensuring cost efficiency and adaptability.
Industry Use Snapshots.
Let’s consider where Fabric applies within industry use cases.
Retail and E-commerce
Use Cases: Inventory management, customer behavior analysis, sales forecasting, and personalised marketing.
Benefits: Fabric can integrate data from various sources, providing a unified view of inventory levels, customer preferences, and sales trends.
This helps retailers optimise stock levels, enhance customer experiences, and increase sales.
Financial Services
Use Cases: Risk management, fraud detection, customer segmentation, and regulatory compliance.
Benefits: Fabric’s advanced analytics capabilities enable smaller financial institutions to detect fraudulent activities, assess risks accurately, and comply with stringent regulatory requirements.
It also helps in segmenting customers for targeted financial products.
Construction
Use Cases: Project management and scheduling, supply chain management, predictive maintenance, quality control and safety, financial management.
Benefits: Integrating data from various project management systems for a unified view of projects can enhance cost controls, optimise resource allocation, reduce equipment failure and monitor safety incidents for improved margin, profitability and compliance across project portfolios.
Manufacturing
Use Cases: Supply chain optimisation, predictive maintenance, and quality control.
Benefits: Fabric helps manufacturers streamline their supply chains, predict equipment failures before they occur, and maintain high-quality standards. This leads to reduced downtime and increased productivity.
Healthcare
Use Cases: Patient data management, predictive analytics for patient outcomes, and operational efficiency.
Benefits: Fabric allows healthcare providers to consolidate patient data from multiple sources, enabling better patient care and operational efficiency. Predictive analytics can help in early diagnosis and personalised treatment plans.
Professional Services
Use Cases: Project management, resource allocation, and client relationship management.
Benefits: Fabric provides professional services firms with insights into project performance, resource utilisation, and client satisfaction. This helps in delivering projects on time and within budget while maintaining high client satisfaction.
Addressing data-related regulatory requirements with Fabric
Each of the industries above have varying exposure to data-related regulatory, compliance and governance requirements. Helping customers to tackle these needs and to confidently improve data usage is a rich vein or service opportunity.
Let’s break down just a few of the common data-related regulatory requirements where Fabric can be applied:
Data Security and Privacy
Fabric ensures that data is stored securely, and access is controlled. It supports encryption and other security measures to protect sensitive information, helping businesses comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and local data protection laws.
Data Governance
Fabric provides robust data governance tools that help businesses maintain data quality, consistency, and compliance. This includes data lineage, auditing, and policy enforcement, which are crucial for meeting regulatory standards.
Compliance Reporting
Fabric’s analytics capabilities enable businesses to generate detailed compliance reports.
These reports can be customised to meet the specific requirements of different regulatory bodies, ensuring that businesses remain compliant with minimal effort.
Cross-Border Data Transfers
For businesses operating across multiple countries in the Asia Pacific region, Fabric facilitates compliant cross-border data transfers. It ensures that data handling practices align with international standards and local regulations.
How Crayon can help
The demand is high for solutions that help SMBs generate value from their data.
Crayon can support you to respond with Microsoft Fabric. We can engage with your business to provide solution education and fit assessments, technical and sales enablement, and migrations.
We can also guide you on where you may be eligible to access funding, promotions and incentives.
Watch the Crayon Cloud Chats podcast on Fabric
Join our in-house experts and guest speaker, Peter Watts from Solentive to explore how to engage your customers in a conversation around modernised data strategies and the power of Microsoft Fabric.
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