Can Microsoft Fabric and ChatGPT be the Killer for BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake and co?
How Microsoft could pull ahead of the Competition in Cloud, Development and Data Science
Microsoft and OpenAI have surprised everyone with ChatGPT and its functions, especially Google, which has been the top dog in the field of AI so far. Microsoft has now taken the lead in the area of ChatBots and has been very smart in integrating it and other AI functionalities into Office and Azure services.
For example, the office products Word, Excel and co. became smarter and easier to use. Even the Business Intelligence tool Power BI can now generate queries based on your wishes via text in the background. Also exciting is the tool Copilot, with which even employees without programming skills can create apps via input, drag and drop and text.
Now Microsoft recently took another significant step and introduced Microsoft Fabric. A new type of end-to-end data and analytics platform built on the company’s OneLake Data Lake. The platform will support integration with other cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform in the near future. The comprehensive offering includes integration tools, a Spark-based analytics platform, a real-time analytics tool and an enhanced Power BI that enables user-friendly visualization and AI-based analytics. In addition, Fabric includes a new no-code developer interface that allows users to monitor their data in real time and trigger actions and notifications based on incoming information[1][2].
Through the service, users experience several benefits such as easier and platform-independent data integration and analysis. Also the processing of data by ETL and ELT processes should be simplified, according to the motto Zero ETL that many of the large cloud providers go. In the area of data analysis, however, it is also possible to make suggestions and generate queries by entering text requests — if you want to dive deeper feel free to use the article linked below :)
The question that now arises — what is the competition doing? The lead that Microsoft has due to the success of ChatGPT is indisputable. Google can only hope that it can catch up soon with Bard. But you can see that besides the ChatBot itself, there are some advantages for Microsoft, namely the compatibility with Office and Azure Cloud products and this does not stop at very popular products such as SaaS Data Warehouses or Lakehouses, where Microsoft certainly did not have an easy time with competitors such as Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake.
But this could change now, because the many advantages that arise from AI and products like Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft suddenly has a huge added value. Data Engineers and Data Scientist, but also good Business Intelligence specialists are rare on the market, this is where Microsoft Fabric comes in and facilitates the entire process chain in the company, be it data pipelines via drag and drop, ready-to-use AI services for Data Science tasks or automatically generated queries through ChatGTP in Power BI and data analysis services in Synapse and co.
While Google is constantly pushing Bard, but it has to be said that its integration into Google’s Office and cloud services is still ongoing, we hear even less about AWS or Snowflake. While AWS at least has a similar infrastructure and size as Google and Microsoft, it will be exciting to see how platform-independent solutions like Snowflake will deal with this. They don’t have the whole cloud and service architecture behind them like the big cloud providers do. Databricks, another solution in the field, has at least announced similar features and is closely tied to Microsoft — either way, you can see that AI services like ChatGPT are also shaking up the market for Data Analytics and Data Warehouses.
Sources and Further Readings
[1] Microsoft, Introducing Microsoft Fabric: Data analytics for the era of AI (2023)
[2] AppMaster, Microsoft stellt Fabric vor, eine umfassende Daten- und Analyseplattform für Multi-Cloud-Integration (2023)
