Microsoft Gets A Handle On The Deluge Of Data

Microsoft is often viewed as the underdog to one of its closest rivals, Apple. While that may be true in some aspects of the B2C market, especially with the rise of the iPhone and the downturn of the PC, Microsoft remains a market giant in the B2B tech world, and has lately been touting its expanding Big Data, software and cloud computing capabilities.

This past week, Microsoft revealed new capabilities for its cloud computing platform Azure to strengthen its B2B offerings even further. Reports said Azure will now include a data warehouse service and a “data lake” that stores Big Data for corporations. It will also introduce the option for companies to run “elastic” databases to store datasets across a wide range of sizes.

The new features were revealed by Microsoft executive vice president of its cloud and enterprise unit Scott Guthrie at the firm’s Build 2015 conference, reports said.

The Azure SQL Data Warehouse is set for launch later this year and will integrate into existing data analytics tools on the Azure platform. What makes this cloud data platform unique, Guthrie said, is its ability to adjust to the size of data as well as the processing power necessary to process the information.

Meanwhile, the Azure Data Lake is geared toward businesses that need to store vast amounts of data for processing by Big Data analytics services. According to Guthrie, the Lake can store an “infinite” amount of data.

Collectively, Microsoft said that the new offerings are adaptable for businesses that experience peaks of data absorption, which solves for the wasted capacity many Software-as-a-Service providers offer business clients. Instead, the “elastic” option of data storage fluctuates with data volume needs.

Updates to Azure and Microsoft’s focus on Big Data are emerging after recent remarks by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who declared that today is the dawn of B2B SaaS, an era of Big Data and intelligent systems to store and analyze information to streamline business operations.