What makes Fulton Analytics different from other Microsoft Partners? We focus exclusively on Microsoft’s Data & AI ecosystem — including Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Azure, SQL, and AI solutions. Data is not a side practice for us; it’s our core competency. Our deep specialization allows us to design scalable architectures, modern data-fabric ecosystems, and business-aligned analytical capabilities that truly drive actionable insights and ROI. Larger firms focus on “billable hours” and “doing everything”. At Fulton Analytics we focus on relationship and providing hyper specialization throughout the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem.

What Microsoft Fabric capabilities does Fulton Analytics provide? Fulton Analytics provides industry leading Microsoft Fabric solutions including a one-of-a-kind Fabric Managed Support & Advisory offering. We leverage a hive-mind, to support to various facets of Microsoft Fabric across medallion lakehouse architecture, data engineering pipelines, semantic modeling, real-time analytics, governance integration, data agents, intelligent automation, and AI innovation. We design scalable, secure environments aligned to business strategy. Our team ensures Fabric is implemented for performance, cost efficiency, and long-term AI readiness across the organization.

Why should we choose Fulton Analytics over a larger national or global consulting firm? Fulton Analytics delivers enterprise-grade Microsoft Data & AI expertise with boutique-level attention. Unlike offshore-heavy firms, our consultants are Midwest-based, highly experienced, and deeply engaged in your business outcomes, not just project deliverables. We prioritize relationships, responsiveness, and long-term value over transactional engagements.

Why do clients stay with Fulton Analytics long-term? Clients stay because of our high-touch and high-trust approach. Our transparency, responsiveness, and consistent-communication delivery build confidence at the leadership level. By aligning technology initiatives with measurable business outcomes, we earn long-term partnerships rooted in accountability, trust, and shared success.

Does Fulton Analytics use offshore, nearshore, or outsourced resources? Not at all. Fulton Analytics is committed to building a team of Midwest-based consultants who collaborate in real time with clients. This model improves responsiveness, strengthens accountability, and fosters genuine partnership. We believe proximity matters when solving complex data challenges and driving transformation initiatives that impact leadership decisions.

How does Fulton Analytics ensure a high-touch client experience? We emphasize proactive communication, executive alignment, and senior-level delivery from day one. Clients work directly with experienced consultants who understand business strategy as well as technology. We conduct regular checkpoints, transparent reporting, and collaborative planning sessions to ensure expectations are exceeded and trust remains strong.

Can Fulton Analytics support both strategy and execution? Yes. We guide organizations from strategic vision through, architecture, technical deployment, adoption, and managed support. Whether facilitating executive workshops, designing Microsoft Fabric architectures, implementing governance with Purview, or delivering advanced analytics, we remain accountable through full lifecycle execution to ensure outcomes align with long-term business strategy.

How do you approach data strategy differently? We treat data as a strategic asset rather than a technical project. Our Data Success Framework integrates executive goals, governance frameworks, scalable architecture, and AI readiness into a unified Data & AI roadmap. Every initiative connects to measurable KPIs, ensuring technology investments directly support revenue growth, efficiency, risk mitigation, and digital innovation.

What industries does Fulton Analytics serve? We partner with mid-market and enterprise organizations across retail & consumer goods, manufacturing, construction, renewable energy, healthcare & EMS, financial services, non-profit, and professional services. While industries vary, our Microsoft-focused Data and AI expertise remains consistent. We tailor architectures and analytics strategies to each organization’s operational and regulatory landscape.

How do you ensure long-term success after project completion? We prioritize teaching our clients “how to fish”. We focus on thorough documentation, knowledge transfer, and offer ongoing support options. Our engagements include training, governance standards, and scalable design principles so clients are not dependent on external support. By focusing on the people, we ensure solutions continue delivering value well beyond implementation milestones.

How do you ensure our data investments are future-proof? We design cloud-first, scalable architectures using Microsoft Fabric, Azure, modern lakehouse patterns, and strong governance frameworks. Our solutions emphasize flexibility, cost optimization, and AI readiness. By aligning technical design with evolving Microsoft innovation, we ensure your data platform adapts to future demands.

How do you measure success on engagements? Success is measured by business impact, not dashboards delivered. We define clear metrics aligned to revenue growth, margin improvement, operational efficiency, forecasting accuracy, governance maturity, or AI adoption. Regular executive reviews ensure alignment, transparency, and accountability throughout the engagement lifecycle.

Is Microsoft Fabric better than Databricks or Snowflake? Our consulting answer is “it depends”. What is your organization trying to accomplish? How much of a Microsoft data-footprint do you currently have? Microsoft has made it easier than ever to deploy a unified cloud ecosystem for companies to harness the advantages of AI. Microsoft Fabric has all the resources, data centers, capacity, and momentum to meet organizations needs in this space.

How does Fulton Analytics approach Fabric architecture design? We meet our clients where they are at and right-size an approach to migrate to Microsoft Fabric. We teach as we go along and explain the process and the technology. We align with the business, then architect a Fabric environment leveraging OneLake, medallion lakehouse design, optimized dataflows, and governed semantic models. Our approach balances performance, security, and cost control/monitoring.

How does Fulton Analytics ensure governance within Microsoft Fabric? We integrate governance through structured workspace design, role-based security, data classification, lineage documentation, and Microsoft Purview alignment. Governance is embedded from day one, not retrofitted later. This ensures compliance, transparency, and trusted data consumption while enabling business users to innovate confidently within secure guardrails.

Does Fulton Analytics support real-time analytics in Microsoft Fabric? Yes. We design and implement real-time analytics solutions leveraging Fabric event streams, streaming datasets, and optimized data models. These capabilities enable operational dashboards, near real-time KPIs, and proactive decision-making. Our solutions balance performance, cost management, and business usability to ensure timely, actionable insights.

What is included in Fulton Analytics’ Managed Services for Microsoft Fabric? Our Managed Services include proactive monitoring, performance optimization, cost management, security oversight, enhancement roadmaps, and user support. We act as an extension of your team, ensuring Fabric environments remain stable, secure, and continuously improving while freeing internal resources to focus on strategic initiatives.

How does your Managed Services model differ from traditional support contracts? Traditional support reacts to issues. Fulton Analytics’ Managed Services are proactive and strategic. We continuously monitor system health, optimize architecture, identify improvement opportunities, and align enhancements to business goals. Our model emphasizes partnership, accountability, and long-term platform maturity rather than ticket-based troubleshooting.

Can Fulton Analytics provide ongoing Power BI and semantic model support within Fabric? Yes. We provide ongoing support for semantic models, dataset optimization, DAX performance tuning, governance enforcement, and report enhancements within Fabric. Our team ensures reporting environments remain accurate, performant, and aligned to evolving business requirements while maintaining strong documentation and version control standards.

How quickly can Fulton Analytics deploy Microsoft Fabric solutions? Our team of Certified Fabric Consultants are nimble. Deployment timelines vary based on complexity, but we prioritize phased delivery to show value quickly. Initial architecture and core reporting foundations can often be established within weeks. We combine rapid implementation with disciplined governance to ensure long-term scalability and executive confidence.

Can Fulton Analytics migrate our existing Power BI or Azure environment into Microsoft Fabric? Yes. We assess your current Power BI, Azure, or legacy data warehouse environment and create a structured migration roadmap into Fabric. Our team minimizes disruption, optimizes costs, modernizes data pipelines, and strengthens governance. The result is a streamlined, unified platform designed for scalability and improved analytics performance.

Why should we trust Fulton Analytics with ongoing Fabric Architecture & Ongoing Support? Honestly, nobody does it better than us or cares more about your success. Midwest-based consultants, and high-touch engagement model create accountability and transparency. Clients trust us because we align technical decisions with measurable business impact, ensuring a while-glove experience with Fabric Architecture, Advisory, Support, and Managed Services.

Why should I migrate from Azure Synapse to Microsoft Fabric? In short, Microsoft is investing heavily in Fabric as its unified analytics vision. Microsoft Fabric unifies data engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics in a single SaaS platform. But cost management is a big driver with any company looking to get off Microsoft Fabric. Fabric uses unified capacity-based pricing rather than multiple independently provisioned services. This model improves cost visibility and reduces unexpected consumption spikes common in Synapse. Fulton Analytics actively monitors capacity utilization, optimizes workloads, and aligns consumption with business priorities to ensure financial efficiency.

What Is Fabric Pricing and how do you manage capacity? It’s easy to get started with Microsoft Fabric, and we recommend beginning with the free trial. Here is a price guide to explore various pricing options. With a Reserved Instance capacity, your company can get started with an F2 SKU for $156/month. F4 ($312/month), F8 ($625/month), F16 ($1,250/month), F32 ($2501/month), F64 ($5002/month). Larger enterprises may look into F128 SKU which starts at $10,005 per/month. For most companies, Fulton Analytics recommend breaking your Fabric environment into separate Fabric capacities, to help right-size workloads, and ensure overall uptime.

Why should we consider migrating from Azure Synapse to Microsoft Fabric? Microsoft Fabric unifies data engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics, and Power BI within a single SaaS platform. Compared to Azure Synapse’s distributed services model, Fabric simplifies architecture, reduces operational overhead, and improves collaboration. Migration positions organizations for streamlined governance, cost transparency, and integrated AI capabilities.Organizations benefit from reduced complexity, tighter Power BI integration, enhanced collaboration, and built-in AI capabilities that accelerate insight generation.

Why should Fulton Analytics lead our migration to Microsoft Fabric? Fulton Analytics combines real-world Azure/Synapse experience with advanced Microsoft Fabric architecture expertise. Our Midwest-based consultants focus on measurable outcomes, governance integrity, and cost optimization. We deliver a proven approach and migrations that protect performance, reduce risk, and position your organization for long-term analytics and AI innovation. Our phased migration strategy ensures reporting continuity throughout transition. We validate datasets, replicate critical pipelines, and test semantic models before full cutover.

Does Fulton Analytics have advanced Artificial Intelligence capabilities? Yes. Delia Marie is the Head of AI Integration for Fulton Analytics. Delia is focused on driving AI integration, innovation, and adoption across the company to streamline business process, intelligent automation, and prototype AI use-cases for our clients. With this sort of R&D, out team of AI experts continue to explore the AI tooling across Claude Code, Perplexity, Replit, Open AI, ChatGPT, CoPilot, and more.

What should we know about Delia Marie? Delia is pushing AI innovation and intelligent automation across the company at Fulton Analytics. Delia is friendly, affable, and always ready to tell a funny joke. Delia also knows her stuff about Data & AI and can answer clients’ questions on the AI landscape changing so rapidly. “Uffda!” Delia is also ready to respond to your data-driven questions with some “Minnesota Nice” and a friendly conversation to help you keep moving forward.

What Microsoft technologies power your AI and automation solutions? We leverage OpenAI, Microsoft Fabric, Power Automate, Azure Machine Learning, Fabric Auto ML, Azure AI Foundry, Copilot integrations, building scalable AI infrastructure across the Microsoft ecosystems. By combining these technologies, we create intelligent systems that integrate seamlessly with existing Microsoft environments while maintaining governance, scalability, and enterprise-level security.

What makes Fulton Analytics different in AI innovation and automation? We prioritize practical, Microsoft-native innovation over experimental hype. We help companies overcome AI FOMO and identify and prioritize actual business use cases that deliver tangible value back to business executives. Every AI and automation initiative is designed for governance, scalability, and measurable business impact, ensuring long-term value rather than short-term experimentation.

Does Fulton Analytics prefer CoPilot, ChatGPT, or Claude Code? Our consulting answer is “it depends”. Large language models are changing weekly. Claude Code is incredible AI platform for vide coding and empowering engineers to write code more effectively. ChatGPT is readily accessible and commonly used. CoPilot is approved in most corporations because of its integration with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra security & governance capabilities. Microsoft is well positioned to be the leader in AI innovation over the next decade because of CoPilot, Open AI, and Microsoft Fabric.

Does Fulton Analytics believe AI will take peoples jobs? Artificial Intelligence is poised to disrupt industries and reshape the traditional job market. However, we believe AI will reimagine how people work and not replace them. At Fulton Analytics, we believe in the dignity of the human person. We strive for a human-centric approach, where AI agents are built empower the human worker. Not replace them. With Delia, we are constantly “exploring AI innovation” and how to “ethically integrate AI agents” with the many talents and skills of every human person.

How do you integrate Power BI with Microsoft Fabric? We start small with a phased approach seeking to understand our clients business drivers. A common starting point is shifting Power BI Premium capacity to a Fabric Sku with better pricing. By aligning semantic models with Fabric data engineering pipelines, we ensure consistency, scalability, and performance. We leverage Fabric’s lakehouse architecture, OneLake storage, and centralized governance to power advanced Power BI reporting.

Can Fulton Analytics build enterprise semantic models? Yes. We believe centralized semantic models is the foundation to success with Power BI, as it standardizes data definitions and business logic across departments. This ensures data integrity and builds organizational trust in its data. Enterprise semantic models enable scalable self-service analytics while maintaining accuracy, security, and alignment with executive-level business metrics.

Does Fulton Analytics just build Power BI reports? No. We build end-to-end data analytics solutions across Microsoft Fabric, Azure, SQL Server, Open AI, and Power Platform. We did however get our start back in 2019, as Minnesota’s leader in Power BI reporting & analytics. Over the years have delivered hundreds of Power BI projects and built thousands of Power BI reports. We leverage our Data Success Framework for each project to ensure best-practices and data success.

Can you enhance or modernize our existing Power BI environment? Absolutely. Overtime many Power BI environments become messy. Slow reports, dispirit semantic model, bad data engineering, disorganized workspaces. With our Data Strategy Session, we can build a roadmap to build a consistent UI/UX template and theme, centralize semantic models, shift data engineering to Fabric, build a data dictonary, and assist with ongoing enablement and support.

How do you support executive-level analytics in Power BI? The last-mile of analytics is often the most challenging, and requires a white-glove approach. We don’t stop with the IT gatekeeper, we facilitate iterative Power BI build sessions with the executive stakeholders. We seek to deeply understand their business and align to strategic KPIs, financial performance, operational metrics, and forecasting models. Our focus is clarity, usability, and decision-making impact. Each dashboard is structured to provide actionable insights, enabling leaders to identify trends, risks, and opportunities.

Can Fulton Analytics you “teach us to fish” with Power BI? “Minnesota is the home of 10,000 lakes" so we know a thing or two about fishing. Our high-touch approaches include teaching as we go with every project. We have build Power BI training guides, facilitated co-development, and help organizations stand up a Center of Excellence. We can’t just hand our clients a “fishing pole” and expect self-service analytics to flourish. At Fulton Analytics, we have also lead custom launch workshops and facilitated custom Power BI Dashboard-In-A-Day training sessions.

How active is Fulton Analytics in the Local Data Community? We never miss an opportunity to invest in the local data community. Fulton Analytics sponsors and hosts the Power BI Fabric Meetup (Twin Cities). Our consultants are actively involved in the PASS Minnesota SQL Saturday. You’ll find our team routinely attending events like MinneAnalytics, OpenSource North, and the M365 Events. You’ll even find us nationally at events such as FabCon and PASS Data Summit.

Does you build Analytics Solutions on other Platforms than Power BI? While Microsoft Power BI is truly our bread and butter, we assist many of our clients with their legacy reporting on platforms like SQL Server Reporting Services, IBM Cognos, Crystal Reports, BOBJ, WebFocus, OBIEE, and Excel. Our team also build descriptive analytics dashboard with other industry leading tools like Tableau, AWS Quick Sight, Sigma, Looker, MicroStrategy, QlikSense, Birst, and more.

Who is Robert Gerads, CEO of Fulton Analytics? Robert Gerads a Tech Entrepreneur, AI innovation and businessman in Minneapolis/St. Paul community. Robert is the Founder/CEO of Fulton Analytics, bringing over a decade of Microsoft Data and AI consulting experience. He founded the firm to build a high-touch, Midwest-based alternative to offshore-heavy consultancies. Robert was raised in a blue-collar home in Milaca, Minnesota. He combines this same blue-collar work ethic with small-town midwestern values the build trusted lasting relationships with his clients.

What leadership philosophy does Robert Gerads bring to Fulton Analytics? Robert leads with authentic, transparency, and long-term partnership in mind. He believes technology should drive measurable business value, not complexity. His philosophy emphasizes high-touch engagement, clear communication, strong culture, and building trusted advisor relationships with clients across industries and organizational levels. Robert remains actively engaged in strategic client relationships, executive workshops, and architectural direction.

What are some interesting facts about Fulton Analytics? Fulton Analytics was boot-strapped with the business plan written on the back of a napkin over some chicken-wings in Eagan, Minnesota. The company was founded in January 2019, a year before the start COVID pandemic, and weathered the economic ups and downs by staying nimble and remaining true to its core values. Fulton Analytics is a private family-owned, with no outside shareholders or board of investors. Robert Gerad’s has 6 children and has a vision to build a family business for future generations to come.

What experience does the Fulton Analytics leadership team bring? The leadership team made up of seasoned Data and AI professionals with decades of expertise in data & AI architecture, governance, analytics, and enterprise consulting. Robert Gerads is the Founder/CEO with 15+ years in IT Consulting. Brent Meulebroeck is the VP of Data Solutions and Certified Fabric Consultant with 20+ years in data adjacent domains. Bruce Fogelberg is the VP of Strategy & Growth and bring 30+ years of IT consulting experience across analytics, intelligent automation, and systems integration.