Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence empowers your organization to transform three data types into actionable insights, from intake and processing to analysis and visualization. Fabric RTI helps you compete with access to accurate, up-to-date information.
Before Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence (RTI), many professionals would waste valuable time waiting for data updates or refreshing dashboards, hoping for changes that never seemed to come fast enough. Microsoft Fabric RTI changes this by providing real-time data processing that empowers faster and more informed decision-making.
Fabric is a software-as-a-service solution encompassing all of Microsoft’s data components into a one-stop shop. Within this ecosystem, RTI is a powerful module designed to instantly process, analyze and even ingest enormous amounts of time-sensitive information. This enables business professionals to make smarter decisions without delay, giving them a significant edge in today’s dynamic markets.
In this blog, we’ll explore what Fabric RTI is, how it works, and the benefits it offers. We’ll also dive into real-world examples of its applications, discuss its availability, and show you how to adopt it.
How Does Fabric Real-Time Intelligence Work?
Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence offers seamless, immediate insights that enable faster and more accurate decision-making. Unlike traditional data systems, Fabric RTI integrates directly into Microsoft’s ecosystem, providing a single platform where all data components are unified. This eliminates the need for complex, separate setups and makes real-time data processing accessible for businesses of all sizes.
One of RTI’s standout features is its ability to set up instant alerts and activators. These aren’t just basic notifications like email updates — they can trigger automated actions, such as robotic process notifications, to address specific issues or engage other systems without requiring manual intervention. This functionality helps your business stay proactive, not reactive, in managing its operations.
Real-Time Intelligence isn’t limited to enterprises, either. By democratizing what was once complicated and costly technology, it brings on-demand insights to businesses at every stage, enabling them to ingest, process and analyze time-sensitive information quickly and efficiently.
To better understand the power Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) brings to Microsoft Fabric, let’s break down the three main types of data businesses need to be effective.
Three Key Types of Data in Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to use management, analytical, and operational data, thanks to RTI, to transform raw information into actionable insights. Let’s take a closer look at each type of data to understand why RTI’s addition to Microsoft Fabric is such a game-changer.
1. Management Data
Management data focuses on key risk indicators (KRIs) and other critical metrics that help organizations monitor their overall performance and risk exposure. This type of data answers the question: What happened?
Most organizations possess some form of management data today. Whether it lives in a spreadsheet, or within a system like Microsoft Fabric, is more about the ability to easily secure, share and visualize this information easily, than the complexity or functionality of the data itself.
Knowing at the end of a given fiscal period how much revenue you generated, what your cost of goods sold (COGS) was, and what your overall expenses and profits are table stakes in running any business.
2. Analytical Data
Analytical data provides a historical perspective by offering snapshots of past performance. It’s instrumental for trend analysis — spotting patterns and opportunities for improvement over time.
The complexity of analytical data increases when the dimension of time is added. Spreadsheets are a far less suitable medium, and a system like Microsoft Fabric becomes necessary to efficiently and securely gather and store the same data at multiple points in time.
Most analytical data sets don’t require real-time data, but they frequently require a grain of time far more accurate than by month or even day. This doesn’t mean you need the data in real time, but you may need the data to be able to differentiate between something occurring at 2:05 a.m. vs 2:07 a.m. on the same day.
A good example of this is the ability to look at trends around order volume over several years. Being able to identify trends such as “we receive twice as many orders on average between 5:00 p.m. EST and 10:00 p.m. EST Monday through Friday than we receive from 8:00 a.m. EST to 5:00 p.m. EST Monday through Friday” allows you to make certain staffing decisions about how to schedule team members who process those orders. It also gives you insight into which months of the year are your busiest.
While both of these types of data allow you to look backward and use that information to predict the future, they can’t tell you what’s happening right now. Let’s talk about what can.
3. Operational Data
Operational data represents the here and now. It allows businesses to track current activities and respond immediately to changes or issues as they arise.
Historically, the problem with operational data has been its complexity. Adding true operational data into your data systems required complex architectures and multiple tools like Flume, Kafka and Mulesoft. With the introduction of RTI into the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, it has finally become point-and-click simple.
This is exciting because previously complex and costly use cases are now viable. These use cases aren’t about looking at the past or trying to predict the future. They’re about being able to take action to change the outcome.
Take an example from an industry near to my heart: insurance. When you file a claim on an insurance policy, you trigger a process with your insurance carrier called their First Notice of Loss or FNOL.
A lot happens during that process, but like any process highly dependent on person-to-person interactions, sudden spikes in demand can hamper your experience. After all, who wants to wait on hold for an hour to file a claim while they’re staring at a roof in their front yard a tornado just blew off?
No amount of looking backward and doing demand planning your insurance company does can predict that event (at least not today). However, if your carrier had access to real-time data from their claims system, call center system, and the National Weather Service, they’d know something was going on within minutes. They could spin up some adjusters to log in from home and take calls to handle the overflow. This is the power that Microsoft Fabric RTI can bring to an organization. The ability to react in real-time to events before they cascade into big problems.
Now that we’ve explored RTI’s capabilities and benefits, let’s discuss how to access and implement it to transform your organization’s data management processes.
Get Started With Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence
As of November 2024, Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is generally available to U.S. and European businesses, making this technology more accessible than ever. While RTI is not yet available for government agencies, Microsoft is working on expanding its capabilities to Microsoft 365 Government soon.
If your business operates in a fast-paced environment where real-time access to data could redefine success, now is the time to act. Fabric RTI enables smarter, faster and more informed decision-making, giving you a competitive edge in today’s dynamic markets.
To help you get started, we’re offering complimentary workshops tailored to your needs. These sessions are designed to help you think beyond the boundaries of your current processes, envision your ideal future state, and identify actionable use cases for RTI.
During the workshop, we’ll collaborate to uncover use cases that are both impactful and feasible, focusing on delivering proof of value in only three to four weeks. This lets you see tangible results quickly while building confidence in Real-Time Intelligence’s potential to drive transformation.
Ready to explore the possibilities? Centric Consulting’s Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence Workshops are your first step toward unlocking the power of real-time data insights. Contact us