Strong Partner Momentum Around Microsoft Advanced Analytics

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This post is authored by Garth Fort, General Manager for Enterprise Partners in the Cloud & Enterprise Marketing team at Microsoft.

At Strata + Hadoop World yesterday, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML), a fully-managed cloud service offering powerful advanced analytics capabilities.

On the one hand, Azure ML, with its free version, rich templates and step-by-step guides makes it a breeze for new users, armed with just a browser and net connection, to get started on data science. On the other hand, Azure ML also offers battle-tested machine learning algorithms and sophisticated tools and capabilities that allow enterprise-grade analytics applications to be created and deployed with relative ease.

Since we launched the public preview of Azure ML in June 2014, thousands of analytics professionals – working at hundreds of Microsoft partner organizations – have adopted Azure ML as a core part of their offering. Yesterday’s announcement further strengthens the partner momentum around Azure ML and Microsoft advanced analytics.

Some of our partners who have embraced Azure ML share their first-hand experiences through the video below:

 

We are energized by our partners’ adoption and validation of our product – some of their experiences are recaptured below: 

  • Cognizant Technology Solutions, a leading Microsoft partner in the big data space, has built a center of excellence around Azure ML and certified associates with hands-on experience are working extensively with the technology. Karthik Krishnamurthy, Global Head, Enterprise Information Management, says:

      “Moving from data to value becomes very important, and that’s what Azure ML is really good at doing”.

  • Infosys, a global IT services giant, has seen their analytics associates rapidly embrace Azure ML. Issac Mathew, a Principal in Infosys’ Analytics Practice says:

    “Something fantastic that I’ve seen in Azure ML studio is the ability to use R scripts. What that means for the existing team is they don’t need to relearn a whole new language. So if you’re an expert in R, you can pretty much use at least 90 percent of the code that you were using earlier as it is directly plugged into Azure ML. So that’s something amazing.”

  • Leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) too are embracing Azure ML to leverage the power of advanced analytics in the cloud. For instance, Dell is incorporating Azure ML into their Statistica predictive analytics solution. John Thompson, General Manager of Dell’s Advanced Analytics Group says:

    “When we saw Azure Machine Learning, the first demo really blew us away. The benefits that we’re seeing from Azure Machine Learning or our customers are seeing from Azure Machine Learning is that we’re starting to have the cloud economics come to play in predictive analytics”.

  • “Born-in-analytics” startup Data Science Dojo offers learning services on Azure ML to customers across the globe and is helping build a global data science talent pool. CEO Raja Iqbal says:

    “We leverage the seamless integration of Azure ML with rest of the Azure ecosystem to train data scientists and data engineers who can handle the proverbial 3 Vs (Volume, Velocity and Variety) of big data.”  

  • Booz Allen Hamilton's Lead Technologist for Data Science, Sean Weppner, had this to say:

    “Azure’s machine learning is a great opportunity for us at Booz Allen, because it enables our teams to connect that much more directly. It enables the management to be able to hop in and see what their engineering teams are doing, visualizing things at every single layer of the analytics in a way that’s much easier than tools that we’ve seen in the past or used in the past”.

To learn more about Azure ML today including a free trial, just click here.

To partner with Microsoft, visit the Microsoft Partner Network where you can enroll, manage your membership and claim partnership benefits.

Garth