Microsoft and Big Data

While I was thinking about researching on Microsoft Big Data strategy, I just read an article about it - Microsoft's big data strategy: Democratize, in-memory, and the cloud - on ZDnet.

So what is Microsoft strategy on Big Data? In short, Microsoft promotes Big Data in 2 fronts: Business Intelligence formed over more than a decade of being in that market; and those of its other lines of business, including online services, gaming and cloud platforms.

In specific, there are following products related to Big Data:

SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse

"Data Explorer" add-in for Excel

Hortwonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows

While the above products are all impressive and can compete with other companies, the Data Explorer is potentially adopted by more users since Excel is so popular in the office software market. 

As this Microsoft blog said, "Data Explorer enhances the self-service BI experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access to a broad range of public and enterprise data sources, enabling richer insights from data that has traditionally been difficult for users to get to. With Data Explorer, users can now quickly and easily import data from a variety of sources, including Web, Excel, Text, Database and Azure. Access to non-traditional sources such as Active Directory, Facebook and big data solutions like Hadoop are now within the reach of any user. Connecting directly to data from the web is easy and intuitive. Filtering and transforming your data can be done in just a few clicks and importing your final data into Excel is straightforward. "

You can check out the video below to see how Data Explorer works.