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Allow us to reintroduce ourselves… For the past 5 years, Interloop has empowered organizations to achieve more with their data. Today, we are proud to enter a new era for both our company and our data-driven clients across the country. Announcing Insights Automated™, a new approach for unifying & gaining insights from your data fueled by Microsoft Fabric. Interloop is ready to help mid-market companies reach new levels of insight and impact. It’s all systems go. And we’re just getting started. The Data Landscape Has Changed The world looks different since we started. The modern data platform entered the scene and enabled us to unify data through a central hub streamlining a simplified path to key insights. Technologies like Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Synapse and more proved that a centralized data approach could create increased agility and impact for organizations. As a Microsoft ISV Partner, Interloop earned early access to the newly unveiled Microsoft Fabric, a “OneDrive” for data and seismic shift in the data landscape. By building on top of this all-in-one platform, Interloop Mission Control will provide a centralized hub for gaining insights and making better decisions faster. This will allow our clients to gain a competitive advantage using the data assets they already own. Your Data Driven Guides What makes the Interloop Way different? Rather than simply providing a tool or standalone recommendations - we focus on creating a holistic solution that drives real impact. Whether you come from Manufacturing & Distribution, Retail & Consumer Goods, Financial Services or the vast spaces between, we meet you where you are today so we may grow with you tomorrow. With our renewed focus, Interloop is expanding our partnerships, team and capabilities to better serve our clients each and every day. Whether they are working to drive growth, reduce costs, gain visibility or make the most of their existing investments - we are here to help you harness and leverage your data to save, scale, safeguard and, ultimately, succeed in your business. Here’s What To Expect From Us You’ll see exciting updates and additions from Interloop in the coming weeks: Expanded Partnerships: We’re all in on our partnership with Microsoft, we just launched Interloop on the Azure Marketplace and strive to be the leading AI & Data Partner in the Southeast & beyond. Thought Leadership: Stay tuned for our Fueled By Fabric webinar coming in October where Loopers will share insights on this innovative new technology and how it can impact your data strategy. Events: We’ll be attending and hosting a full calendar this fall to include sponsoring the SC Manufacturers Expo November 9th-10th. If you will be in attendance, or happen to swing by the Charleston Digital Corridor - please stop by and say hello! Interloop.ai is now Interloopdata.com - Moving forward, all communication and outreach will come from this updated domain. While we will continue to focus on our AI & predictive offerings and associated data engineering as a service solutions, this new domain better encompasses our mission and trajectory. Designed by The Cohort Collab, our refreshed digital hub will host industry insights, resource libraries, thought-leadership, events and more. With You From Insight To Impact As your data partner, our sights are set on the stars and shared success. This renewed mission will enable us to empower organizations like yours to leverage data & predictive analytics like never before. We can’t wait to embark on this mission together. Tony Berry, CEO & Co-Founder of Interloop Jordan Berry, CTO & Co-Founder of Interloop Get Looped In Based in Charleston, SC and serving mid-market companies nationwide, Interloop™ is the Microsoft ISV partner and premier data engineering firm taking emerging entities from data-dark to insight and impact. Integrating people, process and technology, we equip the data curious across industries with a single solution to centralize, organize and act on labyrinths of specialized, siloed and disconnected data sets and services. Powered by Microsoft’s Azure’s comprehensive cloud computing platform and at the forefront of AI with Microsoft Fabric, achieve more with your data. Get looped in or take our 15-minute self assessment today.

In today’s world, we’re awash with a deluge of data - constantly being generated from the devices we use, the systems we build, and the interactions we have. Organizations across every industry are using this data to fuel digital transformation and gain a competitive advantage. Pair this with the emergence of cutting age technology like generative AI - data, and becoming Data-Driven is more important than ever. And yet, this data is often stratified, disconnected, siloed, and difficult to use - meaning most organized are leaving a highly strategic asset on the shelf. It requires new end-to-end tools and a proven approach to activate this data in a way that generate tangible value for the business. That’s why leveraging a human-centered analytics product like Microsoft Fabric, backed by the proven strategies and tactics used across dozens of clients at Interloop is imperative to capturing this opportunity. Struggling to deal with the complex data environment? You’re not alone. Organizations are facing an array of data challenges today such as: Scaling Data & Analytics across the organization while reducing costs & optimizing existing data and management Gaining Business Intelligence Adoption to streamline data usage and insights across departments Encouraging data literacy by making data more accessible and easier to understand by both technical and non-technical team members Balancing the need for governed and self-service data exploration and analytics Limited scalability of legacy solutions while demand from the business explodes Breaking down data siloes across the various departments and functions of the business Delivering on the promise of automated insights with limited resources Like most complex challenges, investing in People, Process, & technology through training, tooling, and a proven approach is essentials to avoiding failed data initiatives. Best of Breed vs All-In-One, which approach is best for my organization? If you search for “Modern Data Platforms”, often times the first result will include an architecture diagram that looks something like this: Building, maintaining, and encouraging adoption of a Modern Data Platform can be a steep learning curve for most organizations but those that are able to overcome this challenge are likely to benefit greatly. If you break it down, there are several key components that make up a modern data platform approach. Connection & Extraction In order to analyze your data, you need to be able to connect to the various cloud applications, databases, file storage, and streaming data sources that generate the data. A modern data platform needs to manage the access credentials and keep open live connections to these data systems. From there, it needs to be able to extract the data into a centralized location - often called the data lake. While some approaches such as Data Virtualization or Zero ETL work to remove any copying of data, in practice - we’ve found that landing a raw copy of the data allows for the most downstream use cases. Example best of breed tools include: CData, Fivetran, Funnel.io, etc Organization & Modeling Once the data has been landed into the Lakehouse, there is work to be done to standardize, organize, and model the data. Example Tools Include: DBT, Transform, Data Bricks, etc Consumptions & Activation Ultimately, being able to make better decisions faster is the key outcome of leveraging Example Tools Include: PowerBI, Tableau, High Touch, Census Governance While entropy, or the idea that all things fall into chaos if not maintained - is just as relevant in Data as it is in physics. Organizations must work to maintain, document, and promote datasets in order to drive adoptions across the organizations. Companies will also need to be very mindful of the contents of this data and the sensitivity of the data. This often means auditing for PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and ensuring that the stricture of data privacy laws such as GDPR & CCPA are being upheld. The MAD (Machine Learning, AI, & Data) Landscape in 2023 An average modern data platform consists of 8 or more tools that must work in harmony to create the desired outcome. For many organizations, this means 8 different contracts with different payment terms, limitations, and usage. Combine this with the need to train your team on the nuances of each tool, the modern data platform approach, and the data systems and processes of your organization - this can often become overwhelming. Example Tools Include: Secoda, To view a full list of tools available in the MAD (Machine Learning, AI, & Data) Landscape - check out this great visual by Matt Turck - https://mattturck.com/mad2023/ Introducing Microsoft Fabric, a unified SaaS-based solution for data & analytics Microsoft Fabric combines several of Microsoft’s flagship data products such as Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Data Explorer, and Power BI into a single, unified experience, on the cloud. The fabric platform is a cost-effective and performance-optimized fabric for business intelligence, machine learning, and AI workloads at any scale. It is the foundation for migrating and modernizing existing analytics solutions, whether this be data appliances or traditional data warehouses. By establishing connectivity and integration, organizations can transform their unstructured and siloed data into a valuable strategic asset through: Data modernization backed by the Microsoft Azure Cloud Cloud-native applications at any scale Responsible, powerful AI to make more informed decision-making Analytics and insights at a faster rate Responsible for machine learning and artificial intelligence Governance backed by Microsoft Purview As we all know, powerful tools don’t solve organizational challenges on their own. It takes a strategy, expertise, and the ability to execute in order to harness the value of any platform. That’s where Interloop comes in - we bring our proven approach, deep expertise, and a team of capable data engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and delivery managers to ensure you achieve a successful data initiative. Solving complex data and analytics challenges with Fabric & Interloop Data is inherently agnostic but can be used in distinct ways based on your business function & use case. Here are a few examples of how you can use data to optimize your organization. Marketing Improve Campaign Analysis & Planning Optimize Paid Media spend & activation Perform unified website, social, & email analytics Sales Identify better opportunities for upsell & cross sell Develop enhanced quoting & pricing plans Improve sales performance through analysis Operations Optimize Production & Delivery Enhance Inventory Planning & Performance Streamline fullfillment & distribution People Reduce employee turnover & improve retention Gain visibility into recruiting & performance Monitor benefits, rewards, and compensation The art of the possible Your customers, employees, partners, and suppliers likely have unmet needs that could be uniquely solved by combining your business strategy with unified data, comprehensive insights, and faster decision-making. Ready to begin your journey, let us loop you in by having a conversation with an expert today.

Microsoft Fabric makes setting up & managing your data platform simpler than ever. Combined with Interloop’s team of experts, you can transform data into insights faster than ever. What is Microsoft Fabric? At Microsoft Build 2023, Satya Nadella introduced Fabric, Microsoft’s unified SaaS-based solution that stores all organizational data. Microsoft fabric combines many of their existing tools, Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Data Explorer & Power BI into a single unified experience. This is all built on top of an open and governed lakehouse foundation layer - introduced as One Lake. The goal of fabric is to create a cost-effective & performance-optimized toolkit that can be used for all things data. This includes running adhoc queries, business intelligence workload, AI & machine learning, & much more. This cloud native offering, handles much of the complexities & technical hurdles that have historically plagued data engineering teams such & creates a single location for an organization to operate their data workloads - regardless of the use case. While this tool has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry, it does still require expertise to operationalize effectively. We’re optimistic that this set of tools will help data teams across the globe deliver more value to those how needs insights to operate their organizations. One Lake: It’s like OneDrive for your Data One of the biggest challenges when trying to build a modern data platform for your organization is copies of data everywhere. You need to manage the data in your operational systems, copy it into your data lake, and then possibly copy the data again into your data warehouse. If you need to share data or access data from a third party, more copies. OneLake aims to solve these challenges for an organization. As Microsoft states: OneLake is a single, unified, logical data lake for the whole organization. Like OneDrive, OneLake comes automatically with every Microsoft Fabric tenant and is designed to be the single place for all your analytics data. Why is this a game changer? By unifying data at the highest level, organizations can finally leverage data as a competitive advantage. Cross functional teams can all operate off the same underlying source of truth to make decisions faster. Combine this with a singular governance model that allows different domains in the business to operate in concert with each other at each step of the way - this is a truly revolutionary approach to data management. What are Shortcuts? In addition to OneLake, Microsoft introduced Shortcuts - a way to connect & analyze data across different business domains (or even other organizations) without having to move the data. For those that are familiar with the promise … and shortcomings, of Data Virtualization — this appears to be a monumental step towards a Zero ETL (LINK) world. Let’s paint this picture a little more vividly - imagine your organization works with Channel Partners that each collect data that needs to be analyzed. Some store it in ADLS, Microsoft’s Storage Layer while others have adopted Amazon’s S3 Storage tools. With Shortcuts, this data can all be analyzed without having to setup any ETL pipeline to consolidate this data into one analytical Store. We’re excited to see the developments with shortcuts but in theory this will open up the ability to share data within & across organizations in wholly novel ways. What happened to Azure Synapse? For those familiar with Microsoft’s analytics offerings - you may be wondering “So what’s going to happen with Azure Synapse?” Microsoft has stated that while Azure Synapse Analytics will remain available to customers, most of the R&D resources will be moving toward Fabric. Reading between the lines, we would expect that the Azure Synapse Studio will not see many updates over the coming months while most of the functionality is moved into Fabric. One of the biggest changes when moving to Fabric is that Microsoft does not intend to move Mapping Data Flows into Fabric. If your organization currently uses MDF, you will need to re-evaluate your approaches to data transformation. Our advice, continue using Azure Synapse Analytics in tandem with Microsoft Fabric until it is available through general availability near the end of 2023. How do I get started with Microsoft Fabric? In an effort to drive organizations to try out Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft is offering a Free trial. You can simply navigate to your existing PowerBI Instances and you will see a new Fabric Branded portal. To navigate directly to Microsoft Fabric - visit https://app.fabric.microsoft.com/ Microsoft Fabric is in Public Preview with General Availability expected to be available near the end of 2023. Should I migrate to Microsoft Fabric? With all these additional capabilities, should you migrate everything to Fabric today? After using Fabric for several weeks, we would recommend the following approach: 1. For production workloads, continue to use Azure Synapse Analytics over Microsft Fabric. We’ve noticed that there are definitely some bugs and shortcomings with the Fabric Interface at the moment (as of publishing this article in August 2023. We expected Microsoft to address many of these challenges in the coming months) → LINK OR EMBED TO FABRIC ISSUE TRACKER Check out our Microsoft Fabric Issue Tracker to a list of shortcomings or challenges our experts have experienced while working with Microsoft Fabric. 2. Adopt the Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse Structure (Files & Delta Tables) Today By adopting the new Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse Standard, organizations can prepare themselves for a smooth migration down the road. By standardizing on Delta Tables, we’ve seen many organizations achieve speed gains, a shared understanding, & technical benefits such as full ACID transaction support an more. To learn more about the benefits of the Delta Table, open source format - Read this article by Data Bricks. 3. Take advantage of the Free Trial to find any data gaps With Microsoft offering a generous free trial, we advise our clients to begin experimenting with Microsoft Fabric to better understand it’s limitations, the capacity pricing model, & new functionality (such as the recently launched Data Activator). If you are already using PowerBI, you’ll be very familiar with the concepts and should be 4. Get Started Experimenting Today Microsoft has made it clear that Fabric is the Future so by experimenting or working with experts today, you’ll be ahead of the curve when Fabric becomes the standard for most Microsoft Based organizations. To learn more about migration specifics & how your organization should think about a transition to Microsoft Fabric - read our Migration Guide: From Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric (LINK TO BLOG) How do I get started today? Schedule a free consultation with one of our experts to understand how you can start using Microsoft Fabric Today.