Unlocking insights from Big Data can be simple with the right tools

Data enthusiasts & Microsoft talk about Big Data in the enterprise at Gigaom Structure Data 2014

Last week in New York, our data solutions experts spent a few days with more than 900 big data practitioners, technologists and executives at Structure Data for a conversation how big data can drive business success.

The rich conversations with attendees at the event were inspiring, and the broad range of speakers was impressive.  Our discussions over the two days in New York centered on what the Big Data solution looks like inside an enterprise and the challenges around accessing and processing big data to make better data-driven decisions.

Structure Data attendees want to combine data from multiple sources to do a couple key things — to gain deeper insights and to ask new questions and get answers.  However, without the right technology to support that, it can be very challenging to do this.  That’s where Microsoft comes in — and where we continued the dialog with attendees as our data experts used a huge Microsoft touchscreens to show how easy it can be to transform big data to insights using simple, front-end tools (like Excel or Power BI for Office 365) and back-end technology for scale, power and speed (like Windows Azure HDInsight and SQL Server).

Microsoft Research Distinguished Scientist John Platt also spoke at Structure Data and shared the latest on our work in machine learning, which is quite pervasive throughout many Microsoft products. If you missed it, take a moment to watch the short chat here.

Our data experts also gave attendees an insiders’ view at how Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center is using data to fight worldwide organized crime and BotNets. (See the video below for more.)

Take the first step and learn more about Microsoft Big Data solutions:

Or, connect with us on Facebook.com/sqlserver and Twitter @SQLServer and learn how Microsoft’s approach to data, big and small, helps employees, IT professionals and data scientists quickly transform data into insight and action.

And don’t forget about the April 15th Accelerate your insights event where Microsoft will unveil the details of new capabilities for the appliance that has both scale-out relational data warehouse and Hadoop in the same box, thus evolving PDW from a solution built for high performance relational data warehousing to a true turnkey Big Data Analytics appliance.