Decisions you can prove. Data that runs the business.

On Microsoft Azure South Africa North in Joburg, with three Availability Zones, or Microsoft Azure South Africa West in Cape Town. POPIA-aligned by default. Fabric capacity runs in your region of choice. OneLake stores one copy per region. The Information Regulator's 2026/27 priorities shifted from reactive complaints to proactive industry sweeps. The first direct-marketing fine of R100,000 was issued to FT Rams Consulting. The maximum penalty is R10 million or 10 years. A global Snowflake deployment cannot truthfully say your data stays in South Africa. Microsoft Fabric on Braintree can.

On data unification, OneLake reads from Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 directly. No ETL. Snowflake reads its own copy, kept in sync by pipelines you maintain. On AI, Fabric agents share the same customer record across Sales, Service, Insights and Contact Center. On TCO, the Microsoft Customer Agreement covers Fabric capacity plus Dynamics plus Microsoft 365 on one renewal. Snowflake wins on cross-cloud compute flexibility and a deep partner network. Microsoft is named a Leader in Gartner's Data Integration Tools MQ for the fifth consecutive year. Honest comparison.

Step 02 Map produces a Snowflake-to-OneLake entity map. Tables migrate via Fabric mirroring, where OneLake reads Snowflake schemas without copying data first, then convert to Delta tables natively. Active dashboards rebuild in Power BI on the same data. Historical records archive to OneLake for compliance retention. Integrations rebuild on Power Automate or Microsoft Foundry. Typical migration runs 6 to 12 months. Braintree is one of nine Microsoft Managed Partners in SA, with proven enterprise data migration experience.

Fabric replaces the data warehouse layer, Synapse, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery; the data lake layer, separate ADLS or S3; the BI tool, when Power BI is already in use; the data integration layer, where Fivetran or Stitch sits; and parts of the data science layer, where standalone Synapse Studio or notebooks sit. It does not replace your operational systems, Dynamics, Salesforce, Microsoft 365. It reads from them via OneLake, not by replacing them.

Stage 02 Evaluate produces a 3-year TCO and payback model per shortlisted agent before any deployment. A sales agent case usually models against pipeline contribution and seller-hours saved. A finance agent case models against forecast accuracy and audit cycle time. A service agent case models against case deflection and CSAT. Microsoft published its own Sales Development Agent benchmark across 61,734 outreaches with a 15.1% lead-to-opportunity rate. We model your environment, not Microsoft's. Braintree doesn't deploy AI agents by default. We deploy them where the TCO case is proven.

Customer Insights Data is the customer data platform inside Dynamics 365 and Fabric. It unifies records from sales, service, marketing, finance and external sources into a single profile on OneLake. A separate CDP makes sense when the data sources are heavily non-Microsoft and the activation channels are heavily non-Microsoft. For an enterprise consolidating onto Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Foundry, Customer Insights is the default answer. The unified record matters more than the CDP brand on the box.

Purview handles data discovery, lineage, classification and POPIA-aligned cataloguing across the Microsoft estate plus connected non-Microsoft sources. Fabric handles the data and analytics workloads. They share OneLake's metadata layer but solve different jobs. For SA enterprises with POPIA exposure or AI deployments running on personal data, Purview moves from nice to have to required once auditors ask, where is your data lineage? We typically deploy Purview at the same time as Fabric for clients in regulated sectors.