Microsoft on Big Data at Strata Santa Clara 2013
We’re wrapping up last week’s Strata Santa Clara 2013 Conference after a flurry of activity! The week started off with Hortonworks announcing the release of the beta of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows, the industry’s first 100% Open Source Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows. Also at Strata, Microsoft released the Data Explorer Preview for Excel, an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service business intelligence (BI) experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access, and we announced that SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), our enterprise class appliance for the most demanding data requiring very high scalability and performance, was available for order. For more information, please visit www.microsoft.com/bigdata.
Keynotes
Dave Campbell kicked off a day of Microsoft activity on Thursday delivering a keynote speech around Halo 4 and big data titled, “Xbox Data is XXL.” His speech was further supported by an article in WIRED and the Halo 4 case study which highlighted how the Halo 4 team is using Microsoft’s cloud-based big data solution.
Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research delivered a second keynote speech titled, “Algorithmic Illusions: Hidden Biases of Big Data,” Both Microsoft speeches were touted as the best of that day’s keynotes.
Sessions
General Manager Eron Kelly co-presented with Paul Henderson from Ascribe (a UK partner) on how Microsoft big data solutions can be used to turn emergencies into actionable data. The title of the session was, “Tools to Turn Emergencies into Knowledge: Turning 911 to 411.”
The previous day, Matt Winkler presented his session titled, “Building Tools for the Hadoop Developer.” In his session, Matt discussed our experience extending Hadoop development to new platforms and languages, as well as our experiments and experiences building supporting developer tools and plugins for those platforms.
You can see scenes from Strata Santa Clara 2013 in our Facebook photo album. Through our sessions, office hours and booth demos, we had the opportunity to talk with hundreds of customers who were very excited to hear about the Microsoft Big Data vision and to see the concrete progress we’ve made with HDInsight. Be sure to join Microsoft at the Strata New York conference in October, where we’ll have much more to share!
Learn more about Microsoft Big Data and test out the HDInsight and Data Explorer previews at www.microsoft.com/bigdata.
