Is Fabric Planning Native? Think Azure Databricks
who builds it, who owns it, and why the arrangement works in your favor
The question I get in every demo, answered plainly: who builds it, who owns it, and why the arrangement works in your favor.
I have given a lot of Fabric Planning demos this year, and the same question comes up before I am ten minutes in. Someone leans toward the camera and asks, “Wait, is this actually a Microsoft product, or is it a third-party tool dressed up to look like one?”
It is a fair question. Finance teams have been sold “native” before and found out later that native meant a custom visual writing to a database it did not really control. So let me answer it the way I answer it live.
Fabric Planning is native. Microsoft launched it as a first-party capability at FabCon Atlanta on March 18, 2026, co-engineered with Lumel. You create it inside Microsoft Fabric as a first-party item called Fabric Plan, sitting inside Fabric IQ. There is nothing to buy separately, no second vendor contract, no extra SKU, and no per-user fee bolted onto the side. It runs on the Fabric capacity you already pay for, under the same admin controls and the same security model as every other Fabric workload. You buy it from Microsoft, you run it inside Microsoft, and Microsoft supports it.
So where does it come from? This is the part worth understanding, and I have found one clean way to explain it.
Think Azure Databricks
If you have used Azure Databricks, you already understand how this works. Azure Databricks is a first-party Azure service. Microsoft sells it, Microsoft bills it on your Azure invoice, and Microsoft supports it under the same agreements as the rest of Azure. The engine inside it was built by Databricks, and the two companies engineered the Azure version together. Nobody opens an Azure Databricks workspace and calls it a third-party tool. It is an Azure service that happens to run on a great engine built by a focused partner.
Fabric Planning has the same shape. Microsoft owns the surface: the distribution, the billing, the security envelope, the support line. The planning engine was built by a company called Lumel and licensed by Microsoft for exclusive native use inside Fabric. When you turn it on, you are using a Microsoft workload. The fact that a partner built the engine tells you something about how it was made. It does not change what it is.
So who is Lumel, and why should you be glad?
This is where I tell finance leaders to relax, because the arrangement is better for you than a purely internal build would have been.
Lumel is the team behind the planning engine. They are about 400 people with more than 3,000 customers and over 15 years of building planning and reporting tools, so they did not wander in off the street. Their Power BI planning product, ValQ, won a Financial Modelling Innovation Award in 2020, and Lumel was rated Best Overall EPM Vendor in the 2025 BPM Partners study. Microsoft names them a Strategic ISV Partner for Fabric. Fabric Planning is not a fresh 1.0. It is the culmination of the products they have shipped on Power BI for years, rebuilt to run natively in Fabric.
Now think about incentives. Inside a company the size of Microsoft, an internally built feature competes for attention with everything else on the roadmap, and a great deal of that attention right now goes to AI and Copilot. Priorities shift, and features can stall when a bigger initiative shows up. Fabric Planning does not carry that risk in the same way. It has a dedicated team whose entire reason for existing is to make this one thing great, and their success is tied directly to the product getting better. That means faster iteration and far less chance of the feature going quiet because something shinier landed down the hall.
You get the better half of both worlds. The reach and support of Microsoft on the outside, and a team on the inside that lives or dies by how good the planning product is.
Why you mostly do not need to care
For most of you, the ownership question matters for about thirty seconds, and then it stops mattering. Your security team cares that it is a certified first-party workload governed by Fabric, with identity flowing from Entra ID. When someone leaves and their account is switched off, their access to the plans goes with it, and there is no separate planning login to chase down. Your procurement team cares that there is no new vendor to onboard and no new contract to sign, because the spend runs through your existing Microsoft agreement and counts toward your MACC. Your admins care that it lives under the controls they already run. On all counts, the answer is the same one you get for any other Fabric workload.
Over time the Lumel name will fade into the background the same way you never think about who built any individual piece of Fabric. You will just call it Fabric Planning, because that is what it is.
The part that was never possible before
The reason I am excited about native, beyond the clean answer to the procurement question, is what it lets you put in one place. Your Power BI semantic models, the ones your organization has invested years in, can sit right next to your planning and your variance reporting, governed by the same security and living on the same data. Analytics and planning stop being two systems you stitch together and become one place where you do the work.
Outside validation backs this up. In May 2026 the IBCS Institute, which sets the standard for how business charts and tables should look, certified Fabric Planning’s reporting. Their CEO, Jurgen Faisst, said it produces IBCS variance reports straight from planning sheets with no coding or ETL.
If you want to get your hands on something today, PowerTable, the data management layer, is the easiest place to start. The product as a whole is close to general availability, so the other pieces are in good shape too. PowerTable is just the simplest on-ramp, and it is the part people keep asking me about.
A fair caution before you run anywhere: Fabric Planning is still in preview. I would not put a live planning cycle on a preview feature yet. Try it on a Fabric trial, prove out a simple use case, and make a deliberate call when it reaches general availability. I keep the running list of what is ready and what to watch in the FAQ.
One last thing
Here is the real reason Fabric Planning PowerTable keeps coming up. Everybody has that one Excel file, the master list that three people email back and forth until nobody knows which copy is right. PowerTable is where that file goes to grow up: a no-code Fabric app with real security, approvals, and an audit trail, sitting next to your planning. If you ran Master Data Services, which Microsoft is removing in SQL Server 2025, it is also a lightweight place to land.
So a few of us built a deep dive on it. Mastering Fabric Planning PowerTable is a hands-on, two half-day workshop with five people who work in this every day. The first cohort starts Monday, June 29, the group is small, and the launch price is half off. Last call before it kicks off next week.
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