{"id":10027,"date":"2026-04-15T08:21:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T08:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weareoakland.com\/?p=10027"},"modified":"2026-04-16T09:01:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T09:01:58","slug":"rajan-chavda-discusses-ms-fabric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weareoakland.com\/blog\/rajan-chavda-discusses-ms-fabric\/","title":{"rendered":"Rajan Chavda Discusses MS Fabric"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Technical Deep Dive with<\/strong>
Rajan Chavda, Senior Solutions Architect<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For our first Spotlight interview, Nicola, our Head of Marketing, sat down with Rajan Chavda to discuss how Microsoft Fabric is paving the way for analytics and AI adoption, the shift from infrastructure management to plug-and-play analytics, and why the single source of truth remains the enterprise’s main goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joining the Dots – The Architect\u2019s Role<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/strong>: Rajan, you\u2019ve been with Oakland for six months, focusing on the Microsoft stack. How do you define the value of a Solutions Architect?

Rajan: <\/strong>There are many interpretations of the role, but for me, it\u2019s about joining the dots. We have experts dedicated to data strategy and governance, and engineers who handle the doing. The architect bridges the gap between business requirements and technical implementation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“The solutions architect is all about joining the dots for our customers, specifically bridging the gap between a business question and technical implementation.”\n<\/h4> <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n


Whether a client is struggling with disparate manual Excel documents or complex legacy systems, my job is to conduct a technology assessment, comparing vendors like Databricks, Snowflake, and Fabric, to ensure the chosen tools and approach meet their specific needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read: The role of Databricks architecture<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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Deconstructing Microsoft Fabric<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Nicola:<\/strong> Microsoft Fabric is being positioned as a significant evolution. What makes it a fundamental shift from traditional cloud platforms?<\/p>\n

Rajan:<\/strong> Fabric is fundamentally a unified analytics platform. With other approaches such as Azure, you had to provision individual networks and components manually. Fabric moves toward a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. You buy capacity (think of it like a Netflix subscription) and get the entire suite – data engineering, data science, and Power BI – in one package. This plug-and-play availability allows us to focus on enriching data and building compelling visualisations rather than managing infrastructure.<\/p>\n \n\n \n Book our Microsoft Fabric workshop <\/span>\n<\/a> <\/div>\n

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Complementing the Existing Estate<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/strong>: For an enterprise with an established platform like Databricks or Snowflake, where does Fabric fit?

Rajan<\/strong>: It\u2019s rarely a rip-and-replace conversation, as Fabric is a complementary estate. While Databricks is exceptionally scalable for back-end engineering, it isn’t always as accessible for business engagement. Fabric can unlock this with Power BI and agentic capabilities, making it excellent for the serving layer. By putting them together, we help clients extract richer insights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Solving the Fragmentation Problem<\/strong><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/strong>: What are the recurring challenges you’re seeing on the ground?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Unified data ensures that when someone asks for a gross profit figure, there is one certified ‘Gold Standard’ report that the business can trust – not a different answer from every department.”\n<\/h4> <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n

Rajan<\/strong>: Nine times out of ten, clients struggle to derive value because their data is siloed. I recently worked with a client who had 30 different systems, none of which were in sync with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you ask five people for the gross profit, you’ll get five different answers because they’re using different logic or disparate systems. Our goal is to build a single source of truth with unified logic. We create certified, Gold Standard products so that when someone asks a question, they know exactly which report to trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n