Choosing a Microsoft Fabric consultancy in the UK

FabCon Europe 2026 brought on-demand billing, a 3x overage rate and the promise of Business Central mirroring. Here is what to ask a Fabric consultancy now.

Why the question has changed

Two years ago, choosing a Microsoft Fabric consultancy in the UK mostly meant finding someone who had done more than one Fabric project. The platform was new and the field was small. That is no longer the test. FabCon Europe in Barcelona this October shipped more change in one week than Fabric saw in its first year, and a lot of it lands squarely on the things a mid-market business pays a consultancy to get right: what it costs, how it is governed, and how data gets in.

So the question is now sharper. Not "have you done Fabric" but "do you understand what Fabric became in October 2026, and can you explain what it means for a business my size". This post is the list of things we would want a prospective partner to be able to answer, with the FabCon announcements that make each one matter. It is written for the buyer, not the vendor, and we are happy to be asked all of it.

Ask about money first

Fabric billing changed shape at FabCon. There is a new F0 capacity with on-demand billing switched on by default, meaning you can start with no reserved capacity at all and pay for what you use. There are also much larger F4096 and F8192 SKUs at the top end, and a formal overage model that bills excess capacity use at three times the pay-as-you-go rate. Pricing for on-demand and F0 had not been published at the time of writing.

The questions to ask: Should we start on F0 and measure before we reserve anything? How will you stop us paying three times the rate for overage we did not know we were generating? What does your capacity monitoring look like, and who reads it? A consultancy that answers with a fixed SKU recommendation before seeing your workloads has not read the announcements. Our own guides to Fabric capacity and sizing without overpaying or throttling set out how we approach it, and the Fabric licensing calculator on this site gives a first estimate.

Ask how your ERP data gets in

For most UK mid-market businesses the most important FabCon announcement was a quiet one: mirroring for Business Central, with public preview expected in a Business Central 29.1 update. Selected tables and companies will replicate into OneLake continuously, with no pipeline to build and no extract job to babysit. Alongside it came mirroring for SharePoint lists and change data feeds for incremental updates.

If your business runs on Business Central, ask the consultancy what they would now do differently. If the answer is a custom API extraction or a nightly export with no plan to move to mirroring when it lands, they are proposing last year's architecture. We wrote about what the preview means in Business Central to Fabric in zero ETL steps, and our Business Central analytics page covers the wider picture.

Ask what they will govern, and what they will leave alone

Governance tooling grew up at FabCon. The OneLake catalog now has table and column level discovery and an expanded Govern area in general availability. Policies in Fabric, in preview, let a tenant restrict who can create which kinds of items. OneLake access audit shows who can see what. Workspace level surge protection is in preview with general availability coming.

The question is not whether the consultancy knows these exist. It is whether they can tell you which three settings matter for a business of your size and which thirty you can ignore for a year. Governance that is too heavy is the quickest way to kill adoption. Our post on Microsoft Fabric policies explained is the kind of answer you should expect, and the Fabric rollout that quietly goes wrong describes what happens when nobody decides.

Ask how they use the agentic tooling, and how they check it

Fabric Runtime 2.0 is generally available with Spark 4.1 and a native execution engine that Microsoft says runs up to six times faster than open source Spark on a benchmark. More interesting is Project Osmos, an agentic data engineering capability in preview where you set the outcome and guardrails and an agent plans, runs and validates the work. Power BI developer mode and the authoring MCP server are generally available, so agents can now build and change semantic models and reports.

Ask the consultancy whether they use these tools, and then ask how they check what the tools produce. A partner who refuses to use them will be slower and more expensive than one who does. A partner who uses them without review will hand you something nobody understands. You want the one in the middle. In the loop or on the loop is our view on where the human sits.

Ask what happens after go-live

Fabric now has unified monitoring with operations agents that investigate failures, Activator alerts on job success and failure, and capacity signals in the Real-Time hub. Those are good tools. They do not read themselves. Ask who will watch your estate in month four, what they will do when a pipeline starts failing at 3am, and what it costs. If the answer is a support ticket queue, the platform will degrade quietly. If the answer is a named person and a monthly review, you are talking to a partner. Our Analytics Acceleration Programme is how we answer that question, and what to look for in a Microsoft data and analytics partner covers the wider test.

Ask whether you need Fabric at all

The best consultancy answer to "should we move to Fabric" is sometimes "not yet". A business with one Business Central company, a Power BI Pro estate and no streaming data may get everything it needs from mirroring into a small capacity, or from nothing more than Power BI for another year. Ask the question directly and watch whether the answer is a sales pitch. Our do you need Fabric page and the Fabric, Databricks and Snowflake comparison are written to help you decide, not to close you.

The short version

Pick the partner who can explain the October 2026 changes in plain English, who starts with your cost model rather than a SKU, who knows that Business Central mirroring changes the architecture, who governs lightly and deliberately, who uses the agentic tooling with a human in the loop, and who has a plan for month four. If they can also tell you when not to buy Fabric, keep them.

How to choose a Microsoft Fabric consultancy in the UK after FabCon Europe 2026