We are pleased to be participating in the Gartner BI conference in Los Angeles this week. As part of our presence at the event, I will be presenting our view on Business Analytics for the New World of Data. There has never been a more exciting time with respect to the world of data. We are seeing the convergence of significant trends that are fundamentally transforming the industry. The first is the explosion of data, there is an entirely new scale and scope to the kinds of data we are trying to gain insights from. The second is a new era of consumer preferences making their way into today’s organization.
As we look at what new capabilities are required for organizations to arm themselves to navigate this new world of data, there are three key ideas that we will share and I’ll talk about what we are delivering to enable this:
First, it’s about providing Immersive Insights, wherever you are:
User expectations of their business and productivity applications have changed. People have grown accustomed to sourcing information for themselves and collaborating in familiar ways, e.g. search and social applications, and they want that same ease of discovery and use at work as they have at home. We believe Business Analytics should be delivered as part of your productivity suite so that you can empower all users with self-service capabilities through familiar tools designed with these new user expectations in mind.
Microsoft pioneered Self-Service BI with the release of PowerPivotin SQL Server 2008 R2. With the general availability of SQL Server 2012 on April 2, we add a second tool to our self-service line-up with Power View. Power View is a highly interactive, browser-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for users of all levels—from business executives to information workers. Now anyone can create a report in just seconds, transform the “shape” of data with a single click, add powerful timed animation sequences to quickly identify trends or anomalies, and make a more convincing case through rich presentation from the insights they discover.
Microsoft also provides IT administrators with the insight and oversight they need through tools for monitoring and managing user created content, dramatically streamlining compliance without hampering user agility and creativity.
Second, it’s about Connecting to the Worlds Data:
There has never been such an abundance of externally available and useful information as there is today. Organizations are challenged with effectively harnessing this wealth of information to gain richer insight. We believe that a Business Analytics platform needs to enable discovery, combining and enrichment of data that exists within an organization as well as data that lives outside the organization.
With the release of SQL Server 2012, Microsoft provides a complete Enterprise Information Management (EIM) suite built with data enrichment in mind. Master Data Services continues to make it easier to manage master data structures (such as dimensions and hierarchies). The new release introduces the MDS Excel add-in aid data stewards in managing and maintaining this data through familiar tools. Also new to this release is Data Quality Services, helping to improve data quality and providing connectivity to 3rd party reference data available on the Windows Azure Marketplace to aid in reliably profiling, cleansing, and matching your data.
To enable you to enrich your data with external data, Microsoft provides a broad variety of Microsoft and 3rd party data sets and information services via the Windows Azure Marketplace from established and new providers. Try out these new capabilities at http://datamarket.azure.com.
Additionally, we continue to release a number of early product concepts for ad-hoc data exploration, enrichment and publishing, social analytics etc. via http://sqlazurelabs.com . Play with them and give us feedback on whether you would like us to productize these concepts.
Third it’s about being able to work with Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere
With more types, shapes and sizes of data than ever before, a modern business analytics platform must embrace the new scope, scale, and diversity of data. The Microsoft data platform provides a complete set of capabilities for data management across both relational and non-relational data, harnessing the power of all data while enabling new levels of scale and availability. In addition, SQL Server 2012 introduces the xVelocity In-Memory technology, providing next-generation performance without the expense of dedicated in-memory appliance solutions.
SQL Server 2012 supports the largest enterprise needs for Analysis and Data Warehouse solutions, with complete fault tolerance and disaster recovery through AlwaysOn, providing the required 9s of up time, while the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse appliance supports volumes in excess of 600TB in size. We also embrace emerging technologies such as Hadoop, with connectors for SQL Server and a Hadoop based distribution for Windows Server and service for Windows Azure, making Hadoop an enterprise ready solution for your organization.
We are pleased to announce the release of the second Preview of our Hadoop based service for Windows Azure. We are expanding capacity of this service by up to 4X to accommodate exceptionally high demand. This preview provides an elastic Hadoop service with more reliability through disaster recovery of the HDFS NameNode, and support for advanced analytics through Hadoop projects like Mahout and Pegasus. Customers interested in signing up for the latest preview should visit http://www.hadooponazure.com.
Join us at the event
Microsoft provides you with an end-to-end business analytics solution through which organizations gain immersive insight from all data across relational and non-relational sources. Enabling you to bring the right insights, to the right person, at the right time through familiar tools like Excel and SharePoint, wherever your users are – and on any device.
The Microsoft team will be onsite to meet with attendees and showcase exciting new developments in these areas. We look forward to speaking with you at the event.
To Learn More:
· Read the Microsoft-led benchmark testing has shown 100X improvement
· Read customer examples of xVelocity (bwin.party and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center)
· Attend the SQL Server 2012 virtual launch experience
· Download an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2012
Douglas Leland
General Manager, SQL Server Product Marketing
Microsoft Corporation
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