End-to-end solutions for big data

These kinds of uses of Hadoop are examples of how big data is changing what’s possible. Our Hadoop-based solution HDInsight is a building block – one important piece of the end-to-end solutions required to get value from data.

All this comes together in solutions where people can use Excel to pull data directly from a range of sources, including SQL Server (the most widely-deployed database product), HDInsight, external Hadoop clusters and publicly available datasets. They can then use our business intelligence tools in Power BI to refine that data, visualize it and just ask it questions. We believe that by putting widely accessible and easy-to-deploy tools in everyone’s hands, we are helping big data reach a billion people. 

I am looking forward to tomorrow. The Hadoop community is pushing what’s possible, and we could not be happier that we made the commitment to contribute to it in meaningful ways.