Microsoft’s Real-Time Intelligence Platform Gets Its First Custom Workload

September 16, 2025 – The landscape for industrial analytics is changing rapidly with the release of Fusion Data Hub workload in Microsoft Fabric in public preview which is the first of its kind for the Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) platform. Fusion’s transition from Azure and its selection as the inaugural RTI workload in Fabric carries strategic significance not only for industrial enterprises but for the promise of AI-driven data environments at cloud scale.  

Fusion Data Hub Moves to Microsoft Fabric 

Fusion Data Hub, already a trusted platform in Azure, has helped many industrial customers unify fragmented Operational Technology (OT) data and unlock value across their operations. Engineers, analysts, and decision-makers have leveraged Fusion’s connectivity from historians, DCS and SCADA and IoT sensors to cloud assets to drive use cases within Azure. Now, with seamless integration into Microsoft Fabric, Fusion extends these strengths into a single, modern environment that brings together analytics, real-time intelligence,  powered insights for faster, more impactful decisions. 

With Fusion Data Hub now launched as the first custom workload on Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric, we’re transforming how customers experience their industrial data. Real-time intelligence is finally at your fingertips, enabling instant insights and actions from operational data streams that were traditionally out of reach.  

Why Fusion Data Hub in Microsoft Fabric? 

Unified Access and Centralized Data

Fusion in Fabric brings together a diverse array of data sources natively. That means time-series data from leading historians (AVEVA PI, AspenTech IP.21) and data feeds from OPC-UA and IoT systems are now available directly within Microsoft Fabric’s unified workspace. All of this is managed and governed within OneLake ensuring security, compliance, and frictionless collaboration for every department. 

Partnering with Microsoft Fabric lets us combine deep domain knowledge with advanced cloud capabilities. By natively integrating time-series data, organizations uncover insights faster than ever before and increase strategic value across every level.

John Burr, Managing Director at Fusion Data Hub

High-Performance Data Processing and Real-Time Analytics

With Fabric’s distributed architecture, Fusion accelerates the ingestion and querying of high-frequency time-series data. Tasks like anomaly detection, smart alerting, and predictive analytics become cloud-native, scalable, and customizable for even the largest companies.  

AI-Powered SaaS Productivity

Since Fusion operates inside Fabric’s SaaS ecosystem, customers work with familiar tools like Power BI, Data Factory, Synapse, and new real-time services without leaving the platform. With Copilot AI embedded throughout, teams can generate insights, models, and visualizations through natural language, making analytics accessible through all levels of an enterprise.  

Seamless, Rapid Deployments

One of the most notable advances with this release is just how quickly Fusion Data Hub can now be deployed and updated for customers.

Fabric’s modern architecture allows us to deploy new Fusion features and improvements with unprecedented speed, cutting down customer deployment times. That means our customers are now able to access the latest capabilities, security enhancements, and connector updates almost immediately

Isaac Vanderpuye, Head of Development for Fusion Data Hub.

The Power of Partnership: A Joint Innovation Roadmap 

Fusion Data Hub’s tight collaboration with Microsoft ensures the product strategy is deeply aligned with real customer needs and future technology trends. As Fabric evolves, with new AI agents, enhanced industry connectors, and user experience improvements, Fusion customers are positioned to benefit immediately from Fabric’s advancement. Industrial customers have challenged us to deliver real-time insights without compromise across latency, security, and user experience. Fusion Data Hub on Fabric answers this call, bringing together trusted analytics and cutting-edge AI to empower operational teams to make faster and more accurate decisions. 

Experience Fusion at Fabcon 

Fabcon attendees in Vienna, Austria are invited to see Fusion Data Hub in Fabric live. Microsoft and Fusion Data Hub teams are on site at the Real-time Intelligence booth to discuss any of your questions. 

Ready to Get Started? 

The Fusion Data Hub Fabric workload public preview is available today. If you want to see it in action, you can start a free trial here. Contact us here to learn more.  

The Digital Operations Signals report aims to uncover fresh learnings about the successes and challenges in the varied approaches that industries adopt for IIoT solutions. The business outcomes that our customers are pursuing to unlock the next level of improvements in efficiency, agility, and sustainability in their physical operations, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, 5G, and more.

To distinguish their companies in today’s competitive landscape, manufacturers must aggressively adopt digital technologies to enable smart operations, products, and supply chains. These projects draw upon concepts and technologies such as digital transformation, Industry 4.0, IoT, IT/OT convergence, AI, digital real estate, and a digital-first culture. Read this paper to understand what is behind the following six key findings:

• Industrial IoT is becoming mainstream.
• Companies are increasingly looking to BUY off-the-shelf solutions
• here are good reasons to use each project approach: BUILD, BUY-AND-INTEGRATE, or BUY
• Large companies prefer to BUILD; electronics and machinery companies prefer to BUY-AND-INTEGRATE.
• Strong IoT vendor ecosystems speed up time-to-value
• Budget constraints have faded, while cybersecurity and knowledge gaps have become key pain points.

The report confirms that adoption of IIoT technology has crossed the chasm and will soon start to be adopted by the Pragmatists, Conservatives and Skeptics. It outlines three main strategies that companies take:

• BUILD
• BUY-AND-INTEGRATE
• BUY

Fusion fits in the Buy category where the company buys the entire IIoT solution which is plug-and-play with existing infrastructure and requires little customization and integration to deliver time-series data into Azure.

We are observing a significant rise in the use of operational data in analytics related to Operational Efficiency, Asset Health, Safety and Sustainability. Fusion has reduced the time to ingest and deliver such data efficiently to data scientists and engineers from months to days. With providing native connectivity to OSI PI, AspenTech IP.21 and IIoT devices in the field, we provide coverage to nearly all such operational data

— Ajay Madwesh, Head of Commercial Operations, Uptake

With more companies choosing the Buy option, the time to create the business case has reduced by 50% (6 months to 3 months) and the time to amortize the investment is 12 months when compared to 24 months with a Build strategy.

Some key lessons learned were to involve stakeholder early on (including senior management and IT/OT personnel), plan specifications well and define the business case early. 

Companies who chose a buy option for a few main reasons:

• The use of tried-and-tested technology: Fusion has been installed at over 50 sites and has proven to ingest time-series data along with metadata and hierarchical data into MSFT Azure
• Predictability of the outcome in terms of cost, time and performance: Fusion has a predictable licensing model and is highly scalable across an enterprise with the ability to start small, install rapidly, and grow with your use cases.
• Quick time to implement: Fusion takes less than 1 week to install within your Azure tenant or our tenant.
• Ease of use: By providing end-user capabilities such as trending time-series data, auto-generating KQL queries, providing standard queries with thorough documentation, and utilizing Azure components, users can quickly get up to speed to solve their use cases.
• Confidence in the future of technology: As a Top Tier Gold Partner of Microsoft, Fusion is highly involved in the future roadmap of Azure. For example, when Time Series Insights (TSI) was deprecated by Microsoft, Fusion released a new version with Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and existing customers easily migrated to the new version with a day’s worth of effort.
• Ease of integration with existing technology: Fusion has first-party connectors to a variety of historians such as OSISoft PI, AspenTech IP.21, Rockwell FactoryTalk, GeoSCADA and Ignition.
• Level of Security Capabilities: Fusion has solved this at various large and medium-sized companies using a variety of techniques such as utilizing private endpoints, installing in the customer tenant, only allowing one-way communication between source and cloud, and aligning to Microsoft’s best practices regarding architecture for time-series data.

We clearly see a trend that people prefer proven standardized solutions rather than building something from scratch. A number of IoT adopters we have seen start building from scratch achieved successful first results in just a few months, but then they realize that it takes an enormous effort to make the solution industrial strength. One issue is to ensure the system handles all major exceptions correctly. Another important consideration is that maintaining custom code can become very expensive compared to a purchased solution that that updates for free

— Dr. Dave Shook, PhD, PEng., Chief Data Officer, Fusion Data Hub