(music)
-: Hi, everybody.
My name is Cillian Mitchell.
I'm a Product Marketing Manager for Power BI at Microsoft.
And today, I'll be giving you an overview
of how you can unleash your Dynamics 365 data
with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI.
With me today, we also have Scott Sewell,
a Principal Program Manager on the Power BI CAT team,
will then take over and give you a demonstration
on how exactly all these products actually work together.
So let's dive in.
To set the scene a little,
we've heard over and over again
that our customers are facing an unprecedented landscape
of challenges and unpredictability.
From rapidly changing customer preferences
to supply chain disruptions,
to a dramatic shift in working from home.
This is actually my second day back
in the office in two years.
And so, you know, with this constant instability,
decision makers can rely less and less
on past experience to help them navigate the market.
Instead, they need to look towards the huge amount of data
that departments generate and account for every day
and adopting analytics tools
and data culture needed to ensure everyone
in their organization can uncover meaningful insights
from their data and make more informed decisions.
An enormous source of this data
comes from the business applications
that your organization uses.
Now, since you're listening to this webinar,
I'm guessing your organization likely uses
some Dynamics 365 apps in at least one department.
But if you're like many of our customers,
you might also have other business applications
like SAP or Salesforce,
or maybe even created some custom apps
using the Power Apps platform.
These business apps connect your processes
and teams together,
generating data on every aspect of your business.
From marketing telemetry to customer service interactions
to financial transactions.
This data can be an invaluable source of insights,
but only if you have the right analytics
and business intelligence engine to uncover them.
You need to be able to ingest, prepare, transform,
and serve this data quickly
and then connect it to a powerful BI platform.
Only then can you put it in the hands
of every decision maker across your organization
and empower them to uncover insights
critical to the day-to-day responsibilities.
Because the right insights can transform departments,
sellers can get a 360-degree view of customers
to personalize their interactions.
Customer service managers
can then analyze customer sentiment across channels
and identify key opportunities for improvement.
Finance managers can discover new growth
and cost drivers by uncovering patterns
across their financial data.
And because of this huge potential,
each line of business is being asked to do more
and be more data-driven.
And then in turn, putting an enormous pressure
on data teams to help them make that a reality.
But you know, this is all easier said than done.
Data teams face a ton of challenges
in setting something like this up, including data silos
and siloed approaches to data integration,
using separate services
at each stage of the analytics workload,
organizational silos between data teams,
skill silos between data engineers
who prefer working in different languages.
And obviously, there's a need to provide
enterprise-grade security at each stage of this process.
And that's why we're working hard to simplify this process.
By seamlessly integrating Dynamics 365,
Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI,
you can now query Dynamics 365 data in near real time
and at limitless scale and then turn that data
into an interactive storytelling experience in Power BI
and even embed it in Dynamics 365
to make it accessible to all.
Essentially, you can create a continuous data pipeline
from your Dynamics 365 applications
that can easily handle petabytes of information,
analyze it, and visualize it in Power BI.
But I think I should probably pause there
and explain what I'm talking about.
What is Azure Synapse Analytics?
So Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service
that brings together data integration,
enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics.
Synapse brings these three worlds together
in a unified experience to ingest, explore,
prepare, transform, manage, and serve this data
for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
I should also explain what Dataverse is
because I know Scott will talk a lot about it
and it's critical to our story.
So Dataverse is the underlying data platform
for all Dynamics 365 applications and the Power platform.
The goal of Dataverse
is help you easily structure your business data
across applications in a secure and compliant manner.
Now in the past, if an organization wanted
to discover deep insights from the data within Dataverse,
it requires stitching together a whole bunch of services.
This created a barrier between business application data
and analytic systems by constantly copying data
back and forth, slowing down time to insight
and requiring constant maintenance and adjustments.
That's why we've created Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.
Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse
makes everything I've been talking about possible.
With just a few clicks,
you can create a continuous pipeline
from your Dataverse data to Azure Synapse Analytics
and rapidly start analyzing and visualizing your data.
Now, normally, when you want to take your data
from Dataverse and move it into a place
where you can do analytics on top of it,
you have to extract, transform, and load the data
which can be very time intensive, cost intensive,
and complexity intensive.
Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse
simplifies this ETL process.
Instead of copying the data constantly back and forth,
you just set it up once.
It automatically runs the ETL process
and sends the data to an informational store
where analytics can have it on top of it.
Any new data that comes in,
follows the same process in near real time.
Then other applications or platforms you're using,
like Power BI, can call into the store immediately,
helping you turn this data into insights and action quickly.
Now I'll turn it over to Scott
who will show you a demo of how this all works.
-: Hello, I'm Scott Sewell.
I'm a Principal Program Manager
on the Microsoft Power BI CAT team,
but I've been working with Dynamics 365 for nearly 20 years.
I've seen firsthand how much rich data
is sitting inside the Dataverse platform
and I've also seen how customers are using that data
for reporting and analytics to drive and improve sales,
richer customer experiences,
as well as improve the experience
and the usage for their own teams.
Today, I want to show you how Dynamics 365
can work seamlessly with Azure Synapse Link
for enriching a and building out that reporting data,
as well as displaying it using Power BI.
I'm excited to show you what we have available
to you right now, so let's get started.
Each day, as our users are interacting with Dynamics 365,
whether through the Customer Service app
where they're capturing service cases or the Marketing app
where they're running marketing campaigns or in this case,
the Sales app where we're capturing sales opportunities.
They're looking at a lot of data, they're processing it,
they're updating it.
They're adding new records to it,
associating records with each other.
All that information becomes this really rich source of data
that we could use to learn from and improve and report on
so that we can make better decisions off of that.
Built into the application now
is a new feature called Visualize This View.
So in this case, I'm looking at a view called Opportunities
and inside the opportunities,
I see that I want to see a visual representation
of what's going on in those opportunities.
Now, this is a quick way of visualizing that
with a Power BI report that's built directly
onto that view.
This is a quick report that allows me to interact with it.
I can highlight and see the cross filtering.
I can even see the text narrative
that's being automatically derived out of this.
I don't have to do anything to set this up.
It's an automatic, quick report that's being created,
but I might want to go further than that.
I might want to look at a bigger picture.
I can see an embedded report, a Power BI report,
embedded into the Dynamics 365 app like this sales pipeline.
Now a Power BI report can be built directly over Dataverse,
the underlying data platform underneath Dynamics.
It can be built there and I can service it right here,
but I might want to go further
and see much larger sets of data.
And in fact, improve the data by supplementing it
from data from other systems
so that it can have this really rich interaction.
I'll come back to this report in a moment,
but let's take a look at how we can get the data there
so that we can take advantage of it.
We built into the Power platform now
is a new feature called Azure Synapse Link.
Azure Synapse Link allows me with a few clicks
to set up a continual data pipeline
that writes out from Dataverse out to an Azure data lake,
which is the Azure data lake is a really inexpensive way
to store massive amounts of data,
in a way that's easy to gather and hold onto
so you can then run an analysis across that.
It really only takes a few clicks to set up a new link.
And I would highlight this and say,
"Here's the subscription.
Here's the resource group I want to use."
All those things and once I've completed that,
I'll have the ability to start adding tables to it.
In this case, I've got my tables already set up
and synchronizing.
And again, as users make changes in Dataverse,
automatically, that goes into a pipeline
that updates the data lake underneath it.
And this data lake, then I can run reports off of.
Now in the past, using a data lake
was a bit more technical approach or technical challenge.
But with Azure Synapse in front of it,
we can automatically set up a workspace
that allows us to ingest that data, explore it,
analyze it, and then prepare it for Power BI.
So let's look at how that data shows up here.
It actually shows up as if it was a full SQL database,
but it's really a serverless table, a serverless SQL table.
And here's my account table.
When I highlight that, I could choose to run
a SQL statement against it
and really a simple query way of accessing that.
I could set up a data loaded into a data frame
for more advanced analysis with Spark
and some other more advanced tools that we have available.
Or I can even set up a machine learning environment
that could train a new model against that data,
where I run regression analysis against
or classify the data where I'm grouping characteristics
of the data together to really better visualize it.
I could run time series forecasting against that
to look further down the line and say,
"How do I predict what's going on?"
All that is a way of enriching the data
that we've pulled out of Dataverse,
possibly supplementing it with data
from other parts of our data state in the business,
even supplementing it with data from outside the business
such as weather data or demographic data
from other third party subscription services.
That data can be brought together, summarized.
It can be fed directly back into Dataverse, in some cases,
where I want to enrich the data that's there
or I can pull it out
and make it a part of a Power BI report.
In this case, I've got a Power BI report
sitting on top of that Azure Synapse Analytics workspace
and this Power BI report just gives me a visual
of how do I see the accounts, the opportunities,
the contacts, et cetera, in that.
And I can bring that and then publish it
directly back in to Dynamics.
So this is what it looks like when I publish it back here.
I can interact with it in really interesting ways
that really summarize and build value into that data.
Like in this case,
I'm looking at the pipeline and I cross highlight.
I can look at the products and like,
if I'm looking at the eReader PIN
or the diamond in seven-inch display.
I can click on that, have a popup
that's pulling additional data in
so I see it in context of what I'm looking for.
I can look at the team and the users.
I can even go further and say,
"Let me understand what the win-loss ratio is
for individual salespeople."
Now I've taken this data, summarized it, and said,
"Show me the data, show me the sales close ratios
for these individuals."
And I see from that summarized data that Spencer here,
Spencer and Mia
and Eric,
and even Alicia,
might have a little bit of a challenge
when they're closing their opportunities.
And so to help them do better
or help them achieve their goals,
I can identify them and then take action on them directly
by saying, "I want to enroll these in,
maybe a follow-up training or a coaching session
by using the embedded Power Automate."
I can send that out,
make sure that I'm taking advantage of data
that I've found and summarized and now taking action on it.
I can go further into it by looking at trend analytics
across the data and saying,
"What does my sales pipeline look
if it follows the same seasonality trends
that I've had in the past?"
I'll see that further.
Or if I look at days of sales
that might have had an unusual spike in data,
an unusual spike in volume there.
I can see revenue one was unexpectedly high
on a particular date, had a value of 277,000,
but really that can be attributed
to possibly that owner of error,
of opportunities of those error was Eric.
And he had an unusually high revenue those days
or maybe it was the major farm or Ethan or Southeast.
Anyway, those are ideas in which we can then go further
and understand the spikes in data
that help us take advantage of those.
We can look at insights to be able to figure out
what's driving particular outcomes.
Like whether the sales opportunity percentage close ratio
is increasing or decreasing.
We can see really if we're doing well
with transportation services
or the campaign is the marketing trends newsletter.
I can look at combinations of segments.
Like this combination is the product
of something other than a particular reader.
And the purchase process is unknown.
And the value is less than $6,000.
We see that as an area
where we're having really strong confluence
of those factors that's driving success.
We can look at the velocity of our sales pipeline,
whether it takes longer to close those opportunities or not.
We can even look at sales discounting.
All of these things are outcomes
that we may want to be measuring or look into.
And if it's in a customer service environment,
you may want to be looking
at how long it takes to close a customer service case
or how many times does it get escalated
before it gets resolved,
or what is the customer satisfaction score coming back?
And we can take that, look at all the components
that may make up bits and pieces of it
and wait those accordingly so that we understand
exactly which factors are driving success
towards the goal we want to measure
and which ones may be common,
but they're not really moving the needle that much.
It's really powerful analysis
that really doesn't take any programming.
It's just click and drag and drop
and set up this key influencer.
We can look at the decomposition treat
where we start taking a value and breaking it out
into its component parts like the devices.
We can see what products make that up,
or within a product, we can break it out
into the territory that is associated with it.
And from the territory, we can even go further
into who's the owner of those records.
A quick way of seeing what is the components
of this model that we're making out.
We can do quick analysis and use the text analytics
to understand what's going on within the data
and ask questions just using English.
But even further than that,
we may want to look inside of an individual record.
So we've brought this together at that aggregate level.
But what if we're looking at an individual customer,
like the Abbot Group?
If I open up the Abbot Group record,
I can see the data that's already been collected about them.
The users are processing.
That's very standard stuff
that we're doing inside of Dynamics 365,
but we can add into a tab for just analytics,
where we build in a Power BI report
that's filtered to just this specific record.
We've seen a lot of success with customers doing this
because this is a quick way they can pull data
from lots of parts of their application,
summarize it in the reports that they have,
and present it in the context of the record
they're working with.
So if I'm interacting with the Abbot Group,
I have visibility into their inventory systems,
their ERP systems or sales or service
or other systems that are completely unrelated.
Maybe a financial system that's giving me visibility
to what our relationship is with Abbot Group.
And I can have an informed conversation with Abbot Group
when I'm doing that by making this platform,
kind of a center of universe,
where we're seeing data from all systems
being brought together
so I can make informed and intelligent decisions.
All this is possible because of the power
and the interconnectivity of this Power Platform.
I'm excited about the future
and what we're seeing customers do
to take advantage of this platform
to solve really interesting business problems.
And I look forward to working with you to solve those, too.
-: Thanks so much, Scott.
Now some of the biggest brains in the world
have already done what Scott just showed
and combined these solutions
and have achieved some amazing results.
I highly encourage you to check out
the Microsoft customer stories
to find some of these examples.
I also encourage you to get your hands dirty
and try it yourself.
Luckily, you can try both Power BI
and Azure Synapse for free
by going to the Power BI or Azure Synapse homepages
or simply typing in these aka links on the slide.
You can also learn more
about the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse
by using the aka link
or simply finding it in Microsoft Docs.
All right, that's all from us folks.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to us
and we are very much looking forward
to hearing about all the cool things you do
with these products.
(music)