Microsoft is pushing its Fabric data analytics and engineering platform to Power BI's customer base, which the company says is an order of magnitude larger than Fabric's current 40,000 customers. Power BI has more than 425,000 customer organizations and over 35 million monthly business users, according to Microsoft executive vice president Arun Ulag. Customers with Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User will get Fabric Apps and Fabric Database capabilities, including up to 1GB of storage per app, along with security, at no additional cost.
The apps are built using Rayfin, an open source SDK that lets users create data applications accepting inputs, writing back data, preserving shared state, and supporting operational workflows across Fabric. Each application gets a 1GB Fabric SQL database, authentication, and security. As an application grows, Microsoft says it can be expanded and handed off to developers or IT teams without being rebuilt. Rayfin is designed to work with GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, or any coding agent, allowing users to instruct an agent to build and deploy an application in a Fabric environment. The feature is scheduled to be available in preview in the coming weeks.
Microsoft argues that apps built in Fabric can be ported to Power BI without much additional work or cost. Ulag said the move shows that the distinctions between a dashboard and an app are disappearing. Microsoft is also previewing bidirectional integration with Salesforce Data Cloud 360, making CRM data available across Microsoft systems for analytics and AI without duplicating it, though Salesforce has its own data environment and agent-building platform.