Sonata Software amplifies Microsoft Fabric’s potential for the CIO

CIOs are in a data race. The need to modernize how they collect, organize, engineer, access, and manage data while keeping the firm operating is a significant challenge. To address the data challenges CIOs and their data teams face, Microsoft developed Fabric, collecting its data solutions into a collective suite designed to ease and accelerate customers’ data modernization journey.

For Microsoft, partners have a crucial role in helping firms adopt solutions, and Sonata Software is an important part of Microsoft’s launch for Fabric. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric, Sonata built the Lightning Build platform as a framework and accelerator for CIOs to adopt, deploy, and support a modern, cloud-based data platform. Together, Microsoft Fabric and Sonata’s Lightning Build platform provide customers with the technology tools and implementation accelerators to implement end-to-end capabilities across each of Fabric’s solutions (see Exhibit 1) while improving the overall customer experience (CX) of enabling data to be an asset for the business.

For example, a multinational retail group investing $300 million in the digital transformation of its stores needed a solution to measure the effectiveness of its investments. Sonata’s CX measurement platform was deployed on Fabric to measure digital and human feedback across channels, improving store experience and efficiency. A global medical technology company wanted to build a platform leveraging electronic health records and data from hospital devices to proactively manage patient health during surgeries. Sonata developed a HIPAA-compliant (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) patient risk stratification solution on Fabric and near real-time next-generation analytics using in-memory Spark pipelines.

Exhibit 1: Microsoft Fabric is an insight-driven modern unified data platform for agile enterprises

Source: Sonata Software, 2023

Sonata’s Lightning is a combination of accelerators that ease enterprises’ adoption of Microsoft’s data solution suite

Sonata previewed Microsoft Fabric for six months pre-launch, making significant strides in helping customers prepare for it. Sonata closely collaborated with Microsoft’s IT, industry solutions, and product engineering teams to provide feedback, identify product bugs, and contribute to multiple new features as part of the launch partnership.

The Lightning Build platform aligns Sonata’s certified professionals, the company’s deep relationship with Microsoft, and customer experiences to help CIOs address data challenges when modernizing systems and moving to the cloud. The platform also helps enterprises build and enhance their application architectures by improving data pipelines and integrations and supporting composable application and microservices architectures.

Sonata also developed unique solutions for accelerating how CIOs and data teams use Microsoft Fabric to build data mesh with three-dimensional pipelines for tagging, metadata building, and search improvement using an AI model. Driven by industry data models, the accelerator helps improve time and cost efficiency by up to 70% for enterprise customers, significantly impacting decision making. Exhibit 2 shows how Sonata envisions helping firms with their complex data challenges.

Exhibit 2: Microsoft Fabric and Sonata’s Lightning Build are attempting to ease the challenges of data for the enterprise

Source: Sonata Software and HFS Research, 2023

Lightning is built for the data, app, and governance needs of the cloud-native organization

While developing the Lightning Build platform, Sonata recognized the CIO’s need to ensure the inclusion of data security and governance. The platform consists of a data platform governance suite that monitors data quality by checking data usage, adoption, and pipeline activities and generating audit reports for policy control and management. The assessment framework for Fabric can assess the maturity of the enterprise data estate from a pre-defined business and technology point of view. Further, this framework assesses the data model and provides recommendations for addressing gaps and promoting new solutions.

Lightning Build platform and Microsoft Fabric are the foundation for a deeper data experience for Sonata customers. The next steps for Sonata are to develop customized industry solutions for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, banking, financial services, and insurance. This next step in modernizing enterprise data fabrics will involve using frameworks that IT leaders can work on with their business partners to optimize operational efficiency, enhance experiences, increase revenue, and reduce costs.

The Bottom Line: Enterprise leaders continue to improve their use of data to achieve business outcomes. While Microsoft’s Fabric makes it simpler to combine crucial data solutions, customers will benefit from solutions like Sonata’s Lightning Build platform for accelerating adoption.

Sonata continues to work with Microsoft to provide solutions combining the familiarity and capabilities of Microsoft data architecture tools into a suite of data solutions. By adopting a comprehensive solution, CIOs and data teams can more easily unlock the potential of their data by leveraging obscure (or dark) data; build connected data mesh across the extract, transform, and load (ETL) workflows; improve the cost of data; and bolster governance.

Sonata is a great example of how partners work with customers and Microsoft to improve data collection, consumption, and collaboration. By bringing new tools like the Lightning Build platform and industry frameworks, enterprises benefit from new ways their IT and business employees can use data to solve workflow and process challenges while gaining important insights into products, markets, and customers.