Cortana Analytics Suite
Yesterday at the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in Orlando Microsoft announced the Cortana Analytics Suite, which is a new package of data storage, information management, machine learning, and business intelligence software in a single convenient monthly subscription. Microsoft’s Cortana personal digital assistant, until now available to consumers on mobile devices and PCs, is part of the new package, designed to give non-technical users a simple interface that can let them ask questions of data and receive answers in response.
In short, it is a fully managed big data and advanced analytics suite that transforms your data into intelligent action.
Here’s a video demonstrating some capabilities of the new Cortana Analytics Suite.
It will be available later this fall as an integrated offering with a simple monthly subscription model that takes advantage of all the relevant analytics and big data capabilities to make better decisions as well as intelligently automate operations. It includes a comprehensive set of cloud services:
| Capabilities | Service | |
| Preconfigured solutions | Business scenarios | Recommendations, Forecasting, Churn, etc. |
| Personal Digital Assistant | Personal Digital Assistant | Cortana |
| Perceptual intelligence | Recognition of human interactions and intent | Face, Vision, Speech and Text Analytics |
| Dashboards and visualizations | Dashboards and visualizations | Power BI |
| Machine learning & analytics | Machine learning Hadoop Complex event processing |
Azure Machine Learning Azure HDInsight (Hadoop) Azure Stream Analytics |
| Big Data Stores | Big Data repository Elastic data warehouse |
Azure Data Lake Azure SQL Data Warehouse |
| Information management | Data orchestration Data catalog Event ingestion |
Azure Data Factory Azure Data Catalog Event Hubs |
Note that all of these services are available now so you can start using them immediately. There will be an on-premises version of Cortana Analytics sometime in the future via the Microsoft Azure Stack (which provides enterprises with the ability to create private clouds with the same bits Microsoft uses to build Azure itself). Cortana Analytics includes capabilities to both discover and connect to a variety of data sources including SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.
For more information on Cortana Analytics Suite visit www.microsoft.com/cortanaanalytics
More info:
Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015
Small and random point, when you go to the “Questions on how to get started? – Click here now” at the bottom of the homepage, it takes you through to a revolution analytics page. I know they were purchased by Microsoft and they are integrating it into SQL 16, so I wonder if Cortana Analytics is an expansion of where they apply R software and if it will be possible to use custom R code or whether it will have to come from the Azure market. Yes this is speculation based only on the redirect page, but it could have implications for people who use R at the moment if they have another tool they can write code for.