Microsoft Wants Azure To Be The Platform For Everyone, Rolls Out Big Data Integrations

Microsoft wants its Azure cloud platform to be the default place for organizations to run their workloads. In an ideal world (in their view anyway), all those workloads would be built upon proprietary Microsoft technologies as well. But that ideal world doesn't exist and Redmond is keen to make Azure as palatable for non Windows workloads as it is for Windows ones.

So given that this week sees the Strata + Hadoop conference taking place, the home of open source big data discussions, it should come as no surprise to see Microsoft further embrace other technologies.

The company announced today that it is launching a preview of its Hadoop-based cloud tool that (gasp!) runs on Linux. At the same time it is making its existing Azure ML service, a machine-learning tool-set, more widely applicable with support for Python. This is in addition to the already-announced support for the R language. Readers will recall that just last month Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, the company behind the open source R language.

In other big-data news from Microsoft , the company is also going to make Storm, an open source stream analytics tool, available for the HDInsight platform with support for .NET and Java. This is in addition to the existing Azure Stream Analytics offering that the company plans to continue to sell.

Finally, the company is inking a deal with data integration vendor Informatica. Informatica is joining the Azure Marketplace. What that means is that the Informatica Cloud agent is now available in Linux and Windows virtual machines on Azure. That will enable enterprise customers to create data pipelines from both on-premises systems and the cloud to Azure data services such as Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory and others, for management and analysis.

In commenting on this new-found lust for all things open and ecosystem related, K. “ Ranga” Rengarajan, corporate vice president, Data Platform and Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, Machine Learning wrote in a blog post that:

Our goal is to make big data technology simpler and more accessible to the greatest number of people possible: big data pros, data scientists and app developers, but also everyday businesspeople and IT managers. Azure is at the center of our strategy, offering customers scale, simplicity and great economics. And we’re embracing open technologies, so people can use the tools, languages and platforms of their choice to pull the maximum value from their data.

Have no doubt - Microsoft is in a headfirst race with Amazon Web Services to win the battle of the cloud vendors. Opening up to all these other solutions adds yet another value proposition for customers looking to decide between Azure and AWS.