Data pipelines & lakehouses
Modern data architecture on Azure, Fabric, Synapse, ADLS, with the governance and lineage decisions auditors care about.

Monitor, refine, reinvent. The half of the engagement that begins after go-live and never ends: security, data agents, telemetry, and the ability to act on both.
Activity · Operate
Run, support, secure, monitor. The day-to-day discipline of a system that someone is paying attention to.
What we build
Modern data architecture on Azure, Fabric, Synapse, ADLS, with the governance and lineage decisions auditors care about.
Decision-ready dashboards, not pretty wallpaper. Designed alongside the people who will use them.
How we work
Where the data is, who owns it, what it is allowed to be used for. The unglamorous question that saves six months later.
The lakehouse, the contracts, the dashboards, kept running with the people who depend on them.
Activity · Optimise
Refine, adopt, reinvent. Continuous improvement driven by telemetry and the conversations that telemetry triggers.
What we build
From classification to forecasting to recommendation, built where the data lives, deployed where the decisions get made.
Curated, contracted, and reusable. The thing every other report secretly wants to depend on.
Practice
How we work
Calibrated to the actual decisions being made, not vanity metrics.
A live data product is never finished. We stay close to the people using it.
our work

Fashion Retailer
First Digital runs a major fashion retailer’s enterprise service management on Freshworks Freshservice, from Azure single sign-on to WhatsApp live chat, across roughly 1,400 agents.
Practice
Enterprise Service Management


Multiple public sector clients
Our First Campus Zero to AI Copilot Hero programme, run with Microsoft, took public sector teams from AI fundamentals to confidently using Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot and their own agents, with a managed-service follow-up so the adoption stuck.
Practice
Copilot Adoption & Enablement


Multiple agri & food clients
Our First Campus Zero to AI Copilot Hero programme, run with Microsoft, took agri and food teams from AI fundamentals to confidently using Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot and their own agents, with a managed-service follow-up so the adoption stuck.
Practice
Copilot Adoption & Enablement


National Hotel Chain
We built and delivered training tailored to a national hotel chain’s own Power Apps and Microsoft 365 setup, and trained the team on Power Apps governance and best practice, so staff could use the tools the business had rolled out and keep the estate secure and maintainable.
Practice
Power Apps & Microsoft 365 Training


International Marketing Group
We moved an international marketing group’s generative-AI inference off public cloud onto our private NVIDIA GPU cluster, so their data and token generation stay local, they pay in local currency, and they run cheaper after hours.
Practice
Private AI Inference


First Technology
We gave First Technology staff local AI chat and agentic desktop agents running on our private NVIDIA GPU cluster, so the data and token generation stay local, the bill is in local currency, and responses come back fast.
Practice
Private AI Inference


Vector Gaming
Vector Gaming needed serious GPU horsepower to train a custom 350-million-parameter model for smarter game NPCs. We put our private GPU cluster behind their Vulkan-based distributed trainer and cut a two-month run down to a fraction of that.
Practice
Distributed Model Training


Property & Assets Group
We ran our Process Practice to map, optimise and govern a property and assets group’s HR processes in Nintex Process Manager, giving them the visibility they were missing and a clear path to automation.
Practice
Process Mapping & Optimisation


Deep-shaft Mining Company
We mapped, optimised and governed a deep-shaft mining company’s HR processes in Nintex Process Manager, turning fragmented manual workflows into a navigable, automation-ready set of processes.
Practice
Nintex Process Manager


Over five years, First Digital turned Western Cape Blood Services into Africa’s first fully digital, end-to-end blood-donation ecosystem, a Microsoft-recognised, AI-powered platform that registers donors 60% faster and answers them around the clock.
Practice
Digital & App Innovation

Hospital Group
A disciplined virtual team and a custom Azure DevOps blueprint that brought consistent delivery to one of South Africa’s largest hospital groups.
Practice
Azure DevOps

National Health Laboratory
A Fast-Track rollout of Microsoft 365 across the NHLS, getting a traditionally on-premises national lab service ready for secure remote work during the pandemic.
Practice
Microsoft 365 Fast-Track

Busamed
A custom Power Apps solution that captures patient feedback at discharge across Busamed’s hospitals, with SAP integration and live Power BI insight for managers.
Power Platform

Assupol
A low-code Nintex K2 workflow that automates policy creation from end to end, with level-based approvals, reminders and escalations, across Assupol’s business systems.
Practice
Nintex Process Automation


International petrochemical
A Nintex K2 and ServiceNow integration that gave a petrochemical company a full audit trail of every change from development to production.
Practice
Nintex Process Automation


A South African retailer
An agile, structured rescue of a retailer’s BizTalk environment that cleared recurring integration errors and lifted system performance by a third.
Practice
Application Innovation

Pharmacy & Retail Group
A phased BizTalk uplift that stabilised a national retailer’s legacy integration estate across point-of-sale, warehouse, finance and supplier systems, without disrupting daily trade.
Practice
Application Innovation

Talksure
A secure, scalable Microsoft Fabric data warehouse on Azure that gives Talksure a single, accurate view of their data to drive decisions.
Practice
Data & AI

Belgotex
A central, modelled data warehouse that pulls Belgotex’s scattered data into one place to report from, with room to take in factory IoT data later.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

GroupM
An end-to-end pipeline that automates GroupM’s data gathering and reporting, so their teams spend their time on analysis instead of assembling spreadsheets.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

Large food to fork biz
A modern, centralised data warehouse on Azure that gave an agricultural supplier a single, trusted source of data and a way off QlikView.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

South African Parliament
A governed reporting pipeline and Power BI dashboards that gave Parliament trusted, timely point-of-sale insight to manage its catering division.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics
Get in touch
Send us the gist of what you are trying to do. The right person from First Digital will be in touch within a working day.