February 14, 2013 News Thursday: Big Data Week Sweeps Microsoft News Center and More Server and Tools News...

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by STB Blogger

How the Big Data Explosion Is Changing the World

Big data is the term that describes the process of applying serious computing power – the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence – to seriously massive and often highly complex sets of information. The ability to analyze big data is opening up a new world of insights about how our world works.

It’s “Big Data Week” on the Microsoft News Center – five days of digital storytelling that showcases what customers, partners, the industry and Microsoft are doing to bring the power of big data to life. To learn more, read the feature article “How the Big Data Explosion Is Changing The World,” then check out the latest research from Microsoft on how companies are using big data to gain a competitive advantage.

Whether Sun or Rain, You Have the Cloud

If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. Or, you can check a new service that uses National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data to generate three-day forecasts of precipitation, temperature, water vapor, and wind temperature. You can use Bing Maps to pinpoint where you want the forecast, and the service creates an animated forecast around that location for an area up to 180 square kilometers in minutes.

This service comes to you as part of Microsoft’s Big Data Week.  You can learn about how Microsoft’s Technical Computing team built a weather forecasting service demo on top of Windows Azure and with Windows Azure HPC Scheduler.

Check out the Next at Microsoft blog post to learn how big data and cloud computing allow you to predict tomorrow’s weather.

Microsoft Named a Leader in Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2013

Once again, Gartner* has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the BI and analytics market. Gartner believes the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets, with a compound annual growth rate of 7% through 2016[1].

You can read the full report, including the market overview and detailed evaluations of Microsoft and other vendors, here. For more thoughts on the state of the BI and analytics market, you can read the full blog here.

[1] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Kurt Schlegel et al, 5 February 2013

Windows Azure Customer emotive Bridges the Mobile-Enterprise Divide

Microsoft BizSpark One startup, emotive, has chosen Windows Azure for fast development and deployment of enterprise mobile applications. emotive moved to Windows Azure for the ability to scale without compromise, and now the company is taking full advantage of the platform.

With emotive, developers can use tools like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create content-rich mobile applications. With the support of Windows Azure, developers are able to create seamless integration between devices and their servers in the cloud. Developers get end-to-end enterprise mobile cloud services, and the applications they write can automatically run on any device. By creating a middleware solution for developers, emotive helps bridge the divide between enterprise and mobile applications.

You can read more about emotive’s use of Windows Azure on Microsoft News Center.

For Microsoft Products, “Licensing” Is No Longer a 4-Letter Word

Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”  We all know how hard it is to understand product licensing. The Microsoft Commercial Presales team has brought their licensing experts together to make that attempt to explain simply, for us mortals, some common scenarios that customers and partners call Microsoft about every day. You’ll be able to learn about general topics such as how downgrades are licensed, or even really complex topics like SQL failover rights.  

Check out the new Art of Licensing blog on TechNet.

Artis Consulting Announces Support for Microsoft HDInsight 

Artis Consulting announced support for Microsoft HDInsight, a distribution of Apache Hadoop for the Windows Azure and Windows Server 2012 platforms that enables customers to seamlessly store and process data of all types. Microsoft HDInsight gives organizations the flexibility of adopting cloud based technology, working with their data on premises, or a combination of both.

Check out Artis’ press release to learn how Artis and Microsoft are working together to help companies gain better business insights from big data.

Pocketstop Takes CRM to the Cloud

Digital marketing firm Pocketstop launched its first Enterprise social CRM and loyalty program on the Windows Azure cloud platform. With Windows Azure, Pocketstop has access to virtually unlimited bandwidth, storage and compute hours, running in multiple global datacenters and can spend more time on developing applications and less time on the infrastructure supporting them.

Read Pocketstop’s press release to learn more about this announcement.

*Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.