Ever wondered what it was like to work with a technology like SQL Server or Azure in their early days—before the polish, before the playbooks, when everything was still being figured out? I’ve had that thought too. And with Microsoft Fabric, I got to live it.

Since its public preview in May 2023, I’ve been hands-on—often hands-and-knees-down—guiding Fabric’s adoption in partnership with a global manufacturing company, helping to establish an organization-wide data platform. From the initial promise to the gritty realities of scaling it in production, I’ve seen it all: what worked, what broke, and what we had to invent along the way.

This session is all about that journey: the architectural decisions, team coordination, and governance challenges that shaped the rollout of Microsoft Fabric into a centralized data platform hub—designed to ingest, transform, and deliver data to a wide range of business applications and data consumers. Serving as a single point of access, this platform now supports everything from data engineering and reporting to machine learning and advanced AI workloads. It’s a story packed with hands-on lessons and practical takeaways that only come from building at scale while the technology is still taking shape.

This talk is aimed at data architects and engineers, platform owners, tech leads, and decision makers exploring Microsoft Fabric.

After this session, you’ll walk away with a clear understanding of what it’s really like to implement Microsoft Fabric in a complex, global organization—and how to set yourself up for success.