You've Bought a Swiss Army Knife, But You're Only Using the Corkscrew

You invested in Microsoft Fabric. Maybe six months ago, maybe a year. The business case made sense. Your data was scattered, reporting was manual, and Fabric promised to fix it all.

So where are you now?
If I had to guess: you're using it as a slightly better version of Power BI. Maybe you've built a few pipelines. Perhaps you're storing some data in OneLake. But the comprehensive data platform you were sold? The lakehouse architecture, the real-time analytics, the AI capabilities?
None of it happened.
And someone—your board, your IT director, your finance team—is starting to ask uncomfortable questions about ROI.

This Isn't Your Fault

Here's what nobody told you when you bought Fabric: the technology works brilliantly, but it doesn't implement itself.
Proper Fabric adoption requires architecture design, data modeling, governance frameworks, security configuration, and ongoing optimization. It's not something you figure out from documentation or YouTube tutorials.

You need expertise. Real expertise.
And here's the problem: the expertise exists, but it comes with a price tag that doesn't make sense for most SMEs.
Big consultancies will happily help you. Their minimum engagement? £150K-£200K. For many businesses, that's more than the annual Fabric spend. The maths doesn't work.
Your internal IT team? They're capable, but Fabric isn't just another tool—it's a platform that requires architectural thinking and best practices they haven't needed before. They need guidance to get started properly, not to be told they can't do it.

What Happens Next?
One of three things:
Option 1: You muddle through. Your team does their best, but without proper architecture, you build technical debt. Things work, sort of, but they're fragile. When something breaks, nobody knows why. When you want to expand capabilities, it's harder than it should be.
Option 2: You pay the Big 5 premium. It works, but the cost makes every stakeholder wince. And when you need changes or support after the engagement ends, you're back to square one.
Option 3: You scale back. Come renewal time, you downgrade to just enough capacity to run Power BI because that's all you're really using. Fabric becomes an expensive Power BI licence, and all those other capabilities you paid for—the lakehouse, the data science, the real-time analytics—quietly disappear from your roadmap.
None of these are good outcomes.

There's a Fourth Option

What if you could access genuine Fabric expertise—the kind that built a practice from zero to significant success—at a price point that actually works for SMEs?

Not £150K engagements. Not junior consultants learning on your time. Real expertise, structured properly, at rates that make the maths work.

That's what Data Partners does.

We focus exclusively on SMEs. We know your constraints. We understand that you need this done right, but you can't pay enterprise rates. Our model is designed around that reality.

We partner with your team to:
• Implement Fabric properly from the start (or fix what's already there)
• Build architecture that scales with your business, not against it
• Transfer knowledge so your team becomes confident and independent
• Get you to the point where you're delivering value on your own

Let's Talk
If you're sitting on a Fabric investment that's not delivering, or you're worried about making that investment because you don't know how to implement it properly, let's have a conversation.

No hard sell. No massive proposals. Just an honest discussion about whether we can help you get value from the platform you've already invested in.

Connect with me here using our Contact Form.