Strata-Hadoop World 2012 Recap
We just wrapped up a busy week at Strata-Hadoop World, one of the predominant Big Data conferences. Microsoft showed up in force, with the big news being our press announcement around the availability of public previews for Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows, our 100 percent Apache Hadoop compatible solution for Windows Azure and Windows Server. With HDInsight, Microsoft truly democratizes Big Data by opening up Hadoop to the Windows ecosystem. When you combine HDInsight with curated datasets from Windows Azure Data Market and powerful self-service BI tools like Excel Power View, it’s easy to see why customers can count on the comprehensiveness and simplicity of Microsoft’s enterprise-grade Big Data solution.
We kicked off the conference with Shawn Bice and Mike Flasko’s session Drive Smarter Decisions with Microsoft Big Data, which offered attendees a hands-on look at how simple it is to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on Windows; the demo combined corporate data with curated datasets from Windows Azure Data Market and then analyzed and visualized this data with Excel Power View (you can watch Mike deliver a repeat performance of his session demos in this SiliconAngle interview). For folks that want to hear even more, Mike will be delivering a webcast later this month that dives into the business value that Microsoft Big Data unlocks, including more demos of HDInisght in action.
Matt Winkler then gave a session on the .NET and JavaScript frameworks for Hadoop, which enable millions of additional developers to program Hadoop jobs. These frameworks further Microsoft’s mission of bringing big data to the masses.
Roger Barga and Dipanjan Banik closed the conference with their editorial session Predictive Modeling & Operational Analytics over Streaming Data, discussing how to leverage the StreamInsight platform for operational analytics. By using a “Monitor, Manage and Mine” architectural pattern, businesses are able to store/process event streams, analyze them and produce predictive models that can then be installed directly into event processing services to predict real-time alerts/actions.
We had the opportunity to talk with hundreds of customers who were very excited to hear about our Big Data vision and see the concrete progress we’ve made with HDInsight. Be sure to join Microsoft at the Strata Santa Clara conference in February, where we’ll have much more to share!
Learn more about Microsoft Big Data and test out the HDInsight previews for yourself at microsoft.com/bigdata.
