Lumel enters into Strategic First-Party alliance with Microsoft to launch Enterprise Planning in Microsoft Fabric

Lumel today announced its collaboration with Microsoft to bring its award-winning enterprise performance management (EPM) suite to Microsoft Fabric. Co-engineered between Lumel and Microsoft, planning in Fabric IQ is a new enterprise planning capability that enables organizations to create plans, budgets, forecasts, and scenario models directly on top of Fabric’s semantic models.

Microsoft Planning in Fabric IQ, now available in public preview, delivers enterprise planning capabilities powered by Lumel’s EPM Suite, a platform consistently recognized with top ratings from independent market analysts and research firms. Lumel was voted the Best Overall Vendor with an outstanding rating of 4.94 out of 5 in the BPM Partners 2025 Pulse of Performance Management survey. Additionally, Dresner Advisory Services recognized the platform as an Overall Leader in its 2025 Customer Experience Model and a Trust Leader in Vendor Credibility.

“Our shared vision with Microsoft is to democratize planning for every organization that has invested in Power BI semantic models,” said Gopal Krishnamurthy, Founder & CEO of Lumel. “By integrating planning data, semantic models and operational workflows directly within Fabric IQ, we are enabling businesses to act  in real time.”

The launch of planning in Fabric IQ represents a definitive step in Microsoft's vision to eliminate organizational data and knowledge silos. Microsoft can now easily enable enterprises to accelerate their modernization and transformation initiatives, replacing manual, fragmented processes with a truly integrated EPM solution. The addition of planning to the Fabric IQ workload also simplifies migration for organizations looking to retire legacy on-premises or siloed planning platforms in favor of a unified, AI-ready data estate.

“Microsoft Fabric is the unified data foundation powering agentic AI across the enterprise,” said Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data at Microsoft. “With planning, Fabric IQ now addresses all timeframes from ‘what happened’, ‘what is happening now’, and ‘what should happen’ which ensures every business user can move faster and think smarter, turning disconnected plans into a cohesive system for confident decision-making.”

Unlocking Business Agility and Productivity

Planning in Fabric IQ is built natively within the Microsoft Fabric architecture, operating directly on Power BI semantic models and leveraging data in OneLake for a zero-copy experience. It enables significant productivity gains for business users by offering a no-code interface for all planning needs. This interface is as flexible and familiar as Excel, retaining full governance and scalability your enterprise requires.

Strategic Highlights:

• Native First-Party Experience: Co-engineered to be a fully native experience in Fabric IQ, inheriting Fabric’s industry-leading security, governance, and shared compute models.
• OneLake Integration: Enterprises can connect planning in Fabric IQ to their data stored on platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, SAP, and Oracle using OneLake Shortcuts and Mirroring. By unifying data from these diverse sources into the OneLake, Planning in Fabric IQ allows users to build sophisticated models without the need for data movement or complex ETL pipelines. This ensures that a single, validated source of truth powers everything from financial budgeting to operational decision-making.
• Governed Data Writeback: Enables users to input budgets and adjust forecasts directly within their Power BI reporting environment, with data instantly written back to a Fabric SQL database, keeping a consistent source of truth.
• Consumption-Based Economics: Utilizes a usage-based model metered in Fabric Capacity Units (CUs), significantly lowering the barrier to entry for enterprise planning and performance management compared to the restrictive seat-based licensing offered by legacy vendors.

Microsoft Fabric customers can access the new planning capability in public preview today as an item within the Fabric IQ workload.

About Lumel: Lumel empowers enterprises to look forward and think ahead with an innovative suite of data products that consolidate planning, BI, and data applications on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. With more than 400 employees, Lumel’s products serve over 3,000 customers worldwide across the Microsoft Power BI and Fabric ecosystem.