… and everything you could know about Satya Nadella’s solution strategy so far (from Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise organization):
Power BI as the lead business solution and the Microsoft’s visionary Data Platform solution built for it
Microsoft’s vision of the unified platform for modern businesses
Keep in mind as well: Susan Hauser [CVP, EPG Group of Microsoft] interviews Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella [Microsoft, Feb 4, 2014; published on Microsoft Youtube channel, Feb 5, 2014]: [Microsoft, Feb 4, 2014: “Satya Nadella is a strong advocate for customers and partners, and a proven leader with strong technical and engineering expertise. Nadella addressed customers and partners for the first time as CEO during a Customer and Partner Webcast event.”]
[Contributor Profile: Susan Hauser, Corporate Vice President,
Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft]
As a teaser Q: [6:43] How do you think about consumer and business, and how do you see them benefiting each other?
A: You know, one of the things that when we think about our product innovation, we necessarily don’t compartementalize by consumer and business, we think about the user. In many of these cases, what needs to happen is experiences. That’s for sure have to have a strong notion of identity and security, so I.T. control, where it’s needed, still matters a lot, and that’s something that, again, we will uniquely bring to market. But it starts with the user. The user obviously is going to have a life at home and a life at work. So how do we bridge that as there more and more of what they do is digitally mediated? I want to be able to connect with my friends and family. I also want to be able to participate in the social network at work, and I don’t want the two things to be confused, but I don’t want to pick three different tools for doing the one thing I want to do seamlessly across my work and life. That’s what we are centered on. When we think about what we are doing in communications, what we are doing in productivity or social communications, those are all the places where we really want to bridge the consumer and business market, because that’s how we believe end-users actually work. [8:01]
More information:
- Will, with disappearing old guard, Satya Nadella break up the Microsoft behemoth soon enough, if any? [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Feb 5, 2014]
- John W. Thompson, Chairman of the Board of Microsoft: the least recognized person in the radical two-men shakeup of the uppermost leadership [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Feb 6, 2014]
1. Power BI as the lead business solution and the Microsoft’s visionary Data Platform solution built for it
Self-service business intelligence solution enables all kinds of business users to find relevant information, pull data from Windows Azure and other sources, and prepare business intelligence models for analysis, visualization and collaboration.
February 10: the top message on the Microsoft News Center
Although it is just linking to this blog entry (no press release or anything like a big splash):
Power BI for Office 365 empowers everyone to analyze, visualize and share data in the cloud [The Official Microsoft Blog, Feb 10, 2014]
The following post is from Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President, Data Platform Group.
On Monday we announced that Power BI for Office 365 – our self-service business intelligence solution designed for everyone – is generally available. Power BI empowers all kinds of business users to find relevant information, pull data from Windows Azure and other sources, and prepare compelling business intelligence models for analysis, visualization, and collaboration.
Modernizing business intelligence
Today business intelligence is only used by a fraction of the people that could derive value from it. What we all need is modernized business intelligence which will help everyone get the information they need to understand their job or personal life better. Not just the type of information gained from an Internet search, but also information from expert sources. Now imagine you could bring together these different information sources, discover relationships between facets of information, create new insights and understand your world better. And that you could get others to see what you see, and enable them to collaborate and build on one another’s ideas. And imagine that available on any scale of data and any kinds of computation you might need. Now imagine it’s not just you – but that anyone can access this kind of data-driven discovery and learning.
Power BI brings together many key aspects of the modernization of business intelligence: a public and corporate catalog of data sets and BI models, a way to search for data, a modern app and a Web-first experience, rich interactive visualizations, collaboration capabilities, tools for IT to govern data and models, and a groundbreaking natural language experience for exploring insights. Together, these capabilities will not just change the kinds of insights we can gain from data, but change the reach of those insights as well.
Bringing big data to a billion users
With Power BI, we have the opportunity to bring these types of data insights to a billion people. Office 365 is broadly adopted and growing – one in four of our enterprise customers now has Office 365. By making our business intelligence features part of Office, we ensure the tools are accessible, and through Office 365, we make the tools easy to adopt – not just the ease of using Web applications, but making things like collaboration, security, data discovery and exploration integrated and turnkey.
I talked earlier about the importance of reach, and one of the ultimate forms of reach we discovered over the course of developing Power BI has been a feature we named Q&A, which allows anyone to type in search terms – just as they would in Bing – and get instantaneous, visual results in the form of interactive charts or graphs.
Power BI for Office 365 Overview [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 22, 2014]
Power BI for Office 365: Self-service analytics for all your data. Learn how Power BI can help you discover, analyze and visualize your data while it empowers you to share your insights and collaborate with your colleagues. Ask questions with Q&A, schedule refreshes from on-prem or cloud data sources and access your reports anytime, anywhere. Try Power BI: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/default.aspx#fbid=lVtiyE9CkuC
Realizing value from data
I personally know how significant this all is – as you can imagine, at Microsoft we run our business on our own data platform and on Power BI. In my role as head of our data platform group, I don’t create a lot of models, but I consume a lot of them – everything from the business financials of the SQL Server business and team management to our engineering and services datasets. My mobile business intelligence application for Windows 8 allows me to interact with our daily engineering data. The ability to visualize and interact with data on my large PPI screen allows me and my finance and marketing partners to meet in my office and have a deep conversation about the business. Collaboration through Office 365 and SharePoint Online allows me to share perspective with my peers around the company.
Power BI for Office 365 has empowered me to realize deeper value from data. I’m excited to share this power with everyone.
Get Insights from Data [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 24, 2014]
One-minute video clip explaining the value of Power BI along with Office 365, focusing on how it addresses business’ pain points (once you have your data, how you get insights from it).
Big insights from big data at the World Economic Forum 2014 [Next at Microsoft Blog, Jan 22, 2014]
I’m at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week – where the world’s leaders, thought leaders and innovators gather to discuss the political, social and economic forces that are transforming the world and our lives. The other force that the World Economic Forum calls out in their program (above all else) are the technological forces.
WEF 2014 education data with Power BI for Office 365 [Microsoft YouTube channel, Jan 21, 2014]
Education data from the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Index — visualized using Power BI for Office 365
Microsoft’s Vision Center sits directly across from the congress hall where all of these forces are being discussed and inside the center we’re showing how our technologies are helping turn data in to insight. As part of their work, the World Economic Forum produces a large volume of data and indices covering 148 countries. When I saw this data set in an Excel spreadsheet I knew it was ripe for transformation using Power BI for Office 365. As you can see in the video above, we’ve taken all of that data and are helping to deliver insight from it using Power View, Power Map and our Q&A technology. When you see health data below over a time period mapped country by country it really bring the data alive. When you can compare educational data across regions, countries and by type of education, once again the data comes alive. The real treat for me has been using Q&A to ask questions of the data much as you would ask questions of a data scientist.
WEF 2014 healthcare data with Power BI for Office 365 [Microsoft YouTube channel, Jan 21, 2014]
Healthcare data from the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Index — visualized using Power BI for Office 365
If you’ve not had a chance to see Power BI in action I’d encourage you to take up a trial of Office 365 and download the Power BI tools from PowerBI.com – it puts the decision making from data in the hands of anyone and I believe will help to deliver insights that answer some of the big questions at Davos this week and in the future.
Source: World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report series (various editions)
Find and Combine Data [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 24, 2014]
One-minute video clip explaining the value of Power BI along with Office 365, focusing on how it addresses business’ pain points (finding and combining data within the SMB).
Microsoft Releases Power BI for Office 365 [C&E News Bytes Blog*, Feb 10, 2014]
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365, a cloud-based business intelligence service that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day, Excel and Office 365. Power BI for Office 365 brings together Microsoft’s strengths in cloud, productivity and business intelligence to enable people to easily analyze and visualize data in Excel, discover valuable insights, and share and collaborate on those insights from anywhere with Office 365.
Power BI for Office 365 with Excel allows business users to easily create reports and discover insights in Excel and share and collaborate on those insights in Office 365. Excel includes powerful data modeling and visualization capabilities which enables customer to easily discover, access, and combine their data. Customers also have the ability to create rich 3D geospatial visualizations in Excel.
With Office 365, customers have access to cloud-based capabilities to share visualizations and reports with their colleagues in real time and on mobile devices, interact with their data in new ways to gain faster insights and manage their work more effectively. These key cloud-based capabilities include:
A Data Management Gateway which enables IT to build connections to on-premise data sources and schedule refreshes. Business users always have the most up to date reports, whether on their desktop or over their device.
[From the preview in Oct’13 here:] Through the Data Management Gateway, IT can enable on-premises data access for all reports published into Power BI so that users have the latest data. IT can also enable enterprise data search across their organization, making it easier for users to discover the data they need. The system also monitors data usage across the organization, providing IT with the information they need to understand manage the system overall.
[Power] BI Sites, dedicated workspaces optimized for BI projects, which allow business users to quickly find and share data and reports with colleagues and collaborate over BI results.
[From the preview in Oct’13 here:] Power BI for Office 365 enables users to quickly create Power BI Sites, BI workspaces for users to share and view larger workbooks of up to 250MB, refresh report data, maintain data views for others and track who is accessing them, and easily find the answers they need with natural language query. Users can also stay connected to their reports in Office 365 from any device with HTML5 support for Power View reports and through a new Power BI mobile app for Windows.
Real-time access to BI Sites and data no matter where a user is located via mobile devices. Customers can access their data through the browser in HTML5 or through touch-optimized mobile application, available on the Windows Store.
[From the preview in Oct’13 here:] The Power BI Mobile App is a new visualization app for Office that helps visualize graphs and data residing in an Excel workbook available in the Windows Store. The user is able to navigate through the data with multiple views and ability to zoom in and out at different levels. This app was first available for Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface devices through the Windows Store and specifically for those customers using the Power BI for Office 365 Preview. It provides touch optimized access to BI reports and models stored in Office 365.
- Power BI App for Windows 8 and Windows RT now available in Store ["Welcome to the US SMB&D TS2 Team Blog", Aug 21, 2013]
- Microsoft mobile app helps citizens report crimes more quickly to police in Delhi, India [The Fire Hose Blog, Jan 29, 2014]
A natural language query experienced called Q&A which allows users to ask questions of their data and receive immediate answers in the form of an interactive table, chart or graph.
Power BI for Office 365 provides an easy on-ramp for organizations who have bet on Office 365 to begin doing self-service BI today. Several customers have already started realizing the benefits of the service, including Revlon, MediaCom, Carnegie Mellon University and Trek.
For more information, read Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform Group’s, post [here you’ve already seen/read above] on the Official Microsoft Blog. Customers can find out more about how to purchase Power BI for Office 365 at powerbi.com.
[*About C&E News Bytes Blog: Here you will find a quick synopsis of all news from Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise organization as it is released with links to additional information.]
Share Data Insights [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 24, 2014]
One-minute video clip explaining the value of Power BI along with Office 365, focusing on how it addresses business’ pain points (once you get your data insights, how you can share it within your SMB and use the data to its fullest potential).
Broncos Road to the Big Game [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 31, 2014]
Power Map tour of the 2013 Broncos season and their road to the Super Bowl XLVIII.
Seahawks Road to the Big Game [MSCloudOS YouTube channel, Jan 31, 2014]
Power Map tour of the 2013 Seahawks season and their road to the Super Bowl XLVIII
What Drives Microsoft’s Data Platform Vision? [SQL Server Blog, Jan 29, 2014]
FEATURED POST BY: Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President, The Data Platform Group, Microsoft Corporation
If you follow Microsoft’s data platform work, you have probably observed some changes over the last year or so in our product approach and in how we talk about our products. After the delivery of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013, we ramped-up our energy and sharpened our focus on the opportunities of cloud computing. These opportunities stem from technical innovation, the nature of cloud computing, and from an understanding of our customers.
In my role at Microsoft, I lead the team that is responsible for the engineering direction of our data platform technologies. These technologies help our customers derive important insights from their data and make critical business decisions. I meet with customers regularly to talk about their businesses and about what’s possible with modern data-intensive applications. Here and in later posts, I will share some key points from those discussions to provide you with insight into our data platform approach, roadmap, and key technology releases.
Microsoft has made significant investments on the opportunities of cloud computing. In today’s IT landscape, it’s clear that the enterprise platform business is shifting to embrace the benefits of cloud computing—accessibility to scale, increased agility, diversity of data, lowered TCO and more. This shift will be as significant as the move from the mainframe/mini era to the microprocessor era. And, due to this shift, the shape and role of data in the enterprise will change as applications evolve to new environments.
Today’s economy is built on the data platform that emerged with the microprocessor era—effectively, transactional SQL databases, relational data warehousing and operational BI. An entire cycle of business growth was led by the emergence of patterns around Systems of Record, everything from ERP applications to Point of Sale systems. The shift to cloud computing is bringing with it a new set of application patterns, which I sometimes refer to as Systems of Observation (SoO). There are several forms of these new application patterns: the Internet of Things (IoT), generally; solutions being built around application and customer analytics; and, consumer personalization scenarios. And, we are just beginning this journey!
These new application patterns stem from the power of cloud computing—nearly infinite scale, more powerful data analytics and machine learning, new techniques on more kinds of data, a whole host of new information that impacts modern business, and ubiquitous infrastructure that allows the flow of information like never before. What is being done today by a small number of large-scale Internet companies to harness the power of available information will become possible to apply to any business problem.
To provide a framework for how we think applications and the information they generate or manage will change—and how that might affect those of us who develop and use those applications—consider these characteristics:
Data types are diverse. Applications will generate, consume and manipulate data in many forms: transactional records, structured streamed data, truly unstructured data, etc. Examples include the rise of JSON, the embracing of Hadoop by enterprises, and the new kinds of information generated by a wide variety of newly connected devices (IoT).
Relevant data is not just from inside the enterprise. Cross-enterprise data, data from other industries and institutions, and information from the Web are all starting to factor into how businesses and the economy function in a big way. Consider the small business loan extension that accounts for package shipping information as a criteria; or, companies that now embrace the use of social media signals.
Analytics usage is broadening. Customer behavior, application telemetry, and business trends are just a few examples of the kinds of data that are being analyzed differently than before. Deep analytics and automated techniques, like machine learning, are being used more often. And, modern architectures (cloud-scale, in-memory) are enabling new value in real-time, highly-interactive data analysis.
Data by-products are being turned into value. Data that were once considered as by-products of a core business are now valuable across (and outside of) the industries that generate this data; for example, consider the expanding uses of search term data. Perhaps uniquely, Microsoft has very promising data sets that could impact many different businesses.
With these characteristics in mind, our vision is to provide a great platform and solutions for our customers to realize the new value of information and to empower new experiences with data. This platform needs to span across the cloud and the enterprise – where so much key information and business processes exist. We want to deliver Big Data solutions to the masses through the power of SQL Server and related products, Windows Azure data services, and the BI capabilities of Microsoft Office. To do this, we are taking steps to ensure our data platform meets the demands of today’s modern business.
Modern Transaction Processing—The data services that modern applications need are broader now than traditional RDBMS. Yes, this too needs to become a cloud asset, and our investments in Windows Azure SQL Database reflect that effort. We recognize that other forms of data storage are essential, including Windows Azure Storage and Tables, and we need to think about new capabilities as we develop applications in cloud-first patterns. These cloud platform services need to be low friction, easy to incorporate, and operate seamlessly at scale—and have built-in fundamental features like high availability and regulatory compliance. We also need to incorporate technical shifts like large memory and high-speed low latency networking—in our on-premises and cloud products.
Modern Data Warehousing—Hadoop brought flexibility to what is typically done with data warehousing: storing and performing operational and ad-hoc analysis across large datasets. Traditional data warehousing products are scaling up, and the worlds of Hadoop and relational data models are coming together. Importantly, enterprise data needs broad availability so that business can find and leverage information from everywhere and for every purpose—and this data will live both in the cloud and in the enterprise datacenter. We are hearing about customers who now compose meaningful insights from data across Windows Azure SQL Database and Windows Azure Storage processed with Windows Azure HDInsight, our Hadoop-based big data solution. Customers are leveraging the same pattern of relational + Hadoop in our Parallel Data Warehouse appliance product in the enterprise.
Modern Business Intelligence—Making sense of data signals to gain strategic insight for business will become commonplace. Information will be more discoverable; not just raw datasets, but those facets of the data that can be most relevant—and the kinds of analytics, including machine learning, that can be applied—will be more readily available. Power BI for Office 365, our new BI solution, enables balance between self-service BI and IT operations—which is a key accelerant for adoption. With Power BI for Office 365, data from Windows Azure, Office, and on-premises data sources comes together in modern, accessible BI experiences.
Over the coming months, we are going to publish regular posts to encourage discussions about data and insights and the world of modernized data. We will talk more about the trends, the patterns, the technology, and our products, and we’ll explore together how the new world of data is taking shape. I hope you will engage in this conversation with us; tell us what you think; tell us whether you agree with the trends we think we see—and with the implications of those trends for the modern data platform.
If you’d like more information about our data platform technologies, visit www.microsoft.com/bigdata and follow@SQLServer on Twitter for the latest updates.
Getting Trained on Microsoft’s Expanding Data Platform [SQL Server Blog, Feb 6, 2014]
With data volumes exploding, having the right technology to find insights from your data is critical to long term success. Leading organizations are adjusting their strategies to focus on data management and analytics, and we are seeing a consistent increase in organizations adopting the Microsoft data platform to address their growing needs around data. The trend is clear: CIOs named business intelligence (BI) and analytics their top technology priority in 2012, and again in 2013.Gartner expects this focus to continue during 2014.2
At Microsoft, we have great momentum in the data platform space and we are proud to be recognized by analysts like IDC reporting that Microsoft SQL Server continues to be the unit leader and became the #2 database vendor by revenue.1Microsoft was named a leader in both the Enterprise Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Waves by Forrester, 3,4and is named a leader in the OPDMS Magic quadrant. 5
The market is growing and Microsoft has great momentum in this space, so this is a great time to dig in and learn more about the technology that makes up our data platform through these great new courses in the Microsoft Virtual Academy.
Microsoft’s data platform products
Quentin Clark recently outlined our data platform vision [here you’ve already seen/read above]. This calendar year we will be delivering an unprecedented lineup of new and updated products and services:
SQL Server 2014 delivers mission critical analytics and performance by bringing to market new in-memory capabilities built into the core database for OLTP (by 10X and up to 30X) and Data Warehousing (100X). SQL Server 2014 provides the best platform for hybrid cloud scenarios, like cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery, and significantly simplifies the on-ramp process to cloud for our customers with new point-and-click experiences for deploying cloud scenarios in the tools that are already familiar to database administrators (DBAs).
Power BI for Office 365 is a new self-service BI solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides users with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights from their on-premises and cloud data.
Windows Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service that offers massive scale-out with global reach, built-in high availability, options for predictable performance, and flexible manageability. Offered in different service tiers to meet basic and high-end needs, SQL Database enables you to rapidly build, extend, and scale relational cloud applications with familiar tools.
Windows Azure HDInsight makes Apache Hadoop available as a service in the cloud, and also makes the Map Reduce software framework available in a simpler, more scalable, and cost efficient Windows Azure environment.
Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a massively parallel processing data warehousing appliance built for any volume of relational data (with up to 100x performance gains) and provides the simplest way to integrate with Hadoop. With PolyBase, PDW can also seamlessly query relational and non-relational data.
In-depth learning through live online technical events
To support the availability of these products, we’re offering live online events that will enable in-depth learning of our data platform offerings. These sessions are available now through the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) and are geared towards IT professionals, developers, database administrators and technical decision makers. In each of these events, you’ll hear the latest information from our engineering and product specialists to help you grow your skills and better understand what differentiates Microsoft’s data offerings.
Here is a brief overview of the sessions that you can register for right now:
Business Intelligence
Faster Insights with Power BI Jumpstart | Register for the live virtual event on February 11
Session Overview: Are you a power Excel user? If you’re trying to make sense of ever-growing piles of data, and you’re into data discovery, visualization, and collaboration, get ready for Power BI. Excel, always great for analyzing data, is now even more powerful with Power BI for Office 365. Join this Jump Start, and learn about the tools you need to provide faster data insights to your organization, including Power Query, Power Map, and natural language querying. This live, demo-rich session provides a full-day drilldown into Power BI features and capabilities, led by the team of Microsoft experts who own them.
Data Management for Modern Business Applications
SQL Server in Windows Azure VM Role Jumpstart | Register for the live virtual event on February 18
Session Overview: If you’re wondering how to use Windows Azure as a hosting environment for your SQL Server virtual machines, join the experts as they walk you through it, with practical, real-world demos. SQL Server in Windows Azure VM is an easy and full-featured way to be up and running in 10 minutes with a database server in the cloud. You use it on demand and pay as you go, and you get the full functionality of your own data center. For short-term test environments, it is a popular choice. SQL Server in Azure VM also includes pre-built data warehouse images and business intelligence features. Don’t miss this chance to learn more about it.
Here’s a snapshot of the great content available to you now, with more to come later on the on the MVA data platform page:
Data Management for Modern Business Applications
Mission Critical Performance with SQL Server 2014 | Available now
Platform for Hybrid Cloud with SQL Server 2014 | Available now
Windows Azure SQL Database | Available now
Modern Data Warehouse
Getting Started with Microsoft Big Data | Available now
Big Data Analytics | Available now
Data Insights Immersion Experience | Available now
For more courses and training, keep tabs on the MVA data platform page and the TechNet virtual labs as well.
Thanks for digging in.
Eron Kelly
General Manager
Data Platform Marketing
———–
1Market Analysis: Worldwide Relational Database Management Systems 2013–2017 Forecast and 2012 Vendor Shares, IDC report # 241292 by Carl W. Olofson, May 2013
2Business Intelligence and Analytics Will Remain CIO’s Top Technology Priority G00258063 by W. Roy Schulte | Neil Chandler | Gareth Herschel | Douglas Laney | Rita L. Sallam | Joao Tapadinhas | Dan Sommer 25 November 2013
3The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Warehouse, Q4 2013, Forrester Research, Inc., December 9, 2013
4The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013, Forrester Research, Inc., December 18, 2013
5Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems by Donald Feinberg, Merv Adrian and Nick Heudecker, October 21, 2013.
Disclaimer:
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.
Free Power BI Training – Microsoft Virtual Academy Jump Start [“A Story of BI, BIG Data and SQL Server in Canada” Blog, Feb 5, 2014]
Whether you’re a power Excel user or you’re just trying to make sense of ever-growing piles of data, we have a great day long, free online training session for you on Power BI for Office 365.
This live, demo rich training will provide sessions covering key Power BI features and capabilities and help you learn about the tools you need to provide faster data insights to your organization.
Course Outline:
Introduction to Power BI
Drilldown on Data Discovery Using Power Query
The Data Stewardship Experience
Building Stellar Data Visualizations Using Power View
Building 3D Visualizations Using Power Map
Understand Power BI Sites and Mobile BI
Working with Natural Language Querying Using Q&A
Handling Data Management Gateway
Get Your Hands on Power BI
Sign Up for this Microsoft Virtual Academy Jump Start led by the team of Microsoft experts who own them.
Live Event Details
February 11, 2014
9:00am-5:00pm PST
What time is this in my time zone?
What: Fast-paced live virtual session
Cost: Free
Audience: IT Pro
Prerequisites: For data analysts, Excel power users, or anyone looking to turn their data into useful business information.
Register Now>>
Power BI Webinar Series [MSFT for Work Blog, Jan 22, 2014]
Big data scientists and the finance department haven’t always seen eye to eye in most companies. Now is your chance to embrace big data to free your finance department to focus on the ways to add the most value.
You are invited to join Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera and members of the Microsoft finance leadership team to find out what they did to become a more empowered and influential finance organization. The powerful new business intelligence tools they will demonstrate have been under wraps for almost two years and have so far only been used within Microsoft.
Now the tools have been road-tested and are ready for you to try. Grab your chance to learn how the Microsoft new BI tools will help your business not only adapt to the world of big data, but actually thrive in it.
Register for any and all of the webinars you are interested in:
1/23/14: Visualization: See how these powerful new tools have improved Microsoft’s ability to consume big data and develop insights by simplifying the data and using visualization tools. Register here.
1/30/14: Definitions: Get the best practices for creating and aligning behind a common set of data definitions and taxonomies. Learn how to get everyone on the same page. Register here.
2/13/14: Outsourcing: Learn how Microsoft worked with partners to optimize and outsource non-strategic finance tasks so the organization could focus on high-value activities. Register here.
2/20/14: Cloud collaboration: Learn how your organization can focus more time on delivering business insights by using Power BI and Microsoft Office 365. Register here.
3/6/14: Making things easy to comprehend without making them simplistic: See how Microsoft finance teams consume and analyze millions of rows of data and present their analysis in a narrative that’s easy to understand for multiple audiences. Register here.
Taken together, this series of webinars will help your company’s finance department adapt to a world of rapidly shifting paradigms and what can be, without the right tools, the overwhelming era of big data.
Business Intelligence: “The Eyes and Ears of Your Business” [Microsoft for Work Blog, Jan 30, 2014]
Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, and technology is making that process increasingly easier and more affordable. The challenge for business owners is 1) how to quickly turn that raw data into actionable business insights, and 2) how to give more people within an organization access to those insights on a self-serve basis.
Organizations must have insight into how their operations are performing in order to stay competitive. Companies who successfully manage their big data assets are more profitable than companies not making this investment, says Jason Baick, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. Simply put, “[business intelligence] is the eyes and ears of your business,” Baick says.
Release data from the IT department
Data analysis started off as a highly specialized process. “It was always a barrier to self-service information … the treasure trove of the data was locked up in the IT department,” Baick points out. Today there are easy-to-use data visualization tools that offer anyone within an organization access to real-time business insights.
Take the Microsoft Power BI suite, for example, which gives both businesses and the individual an easy-to-use platform to visualize their data. Given that many businesses already have the infrastructure that Power BI is built on (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint) and a familiarity with its feature set, integration and adoption is simplified. Your users don’t have an intimidation factor because they already know how to use Excel, explains Baick. By equipping your employees with these types of tools, you can enable team members to unearth real-time insights, ranging from targeting a prospect at the exact right time to make the sale, to determining where the company can cut costs, to revealing where they should invest more.
Here’s a rundown of specific Power BI tools and what they can offer your business:
Discover and Combine
Search and access all your company’s data and public data from one place using Power Query. Give your team the ability to be more efficient while cutting down on the cost of investing in multiple, disparate data tools.
Model and Analyze
Empower your employees to create analytical models using Power Pivot. Since this is built on familiar software like Excel, you won’t have to worry about the cost of training or having to hire new staff for implementation.
Visualize
Power View and Power Map enables your team members to quickly translate big data sets and create easy-to-understand visuals without a huge time investment.
Share and Collaborate
Seamlessly share and edit workbooks from any device, allowing your employees quick and easy access to important information in real time.
Get Answers and Insights
The new Q&A feature gives your employees the ability to ask any question of their data without requiring specialized skills to draw out these insights.
Access Anywhere
Give your staff access to the Power BI tool set from any device, any location. This empowers your employees to access data in real time, which could mean the difference between making and not making a sale.
How are people using Power BI?
Companies like MCH Strategic Data are already employing the Power BI suite to get more out of their data. MCH collects an enormous amount of education and healthcare marketing data for their clients. After 85 years in the business, they’re now able to deliver new and unique insights to clients like never before. One application has been to create videos using tools like Power Map to create data visualizations showing the geographic range of socioeconomic status across various school districts. They’ve also made subsets of their data available and searchable by Power BI users, including datasets on hospitals, school systems, and emergency preparedness services throughout the US
Building a data-driven organization
Everyone at your company can contribute to uncovering business insights, and it’s important to give them the tools to do so. Using your data in a smart and strategic way enables you to turn it into actionable business insights and to stay ahead of the competition.
The Autonomy of Marketing with Big Data [Microsoft for Work Blog, Jan 15, 2014]
We spoke to Jeff Marcoux, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics CRM, about how big data and data insights have changed marketing. He outlined three ways that companies can use big data to reimagine their marketing efforts.
He also outlined an all-encompassing rule when using data insights for marketing efforts: it’s not about how much data you have, it’s what you do with it. “Large data makes graphs, but significant data tells a story,” said Marcoux. Learning how to leverage significant big data into actionable insights is the key to unlocking its potential as an asset to your business. Here are Jeff’s three key ways companies can do smart things with their data:
Embrace the idea that autonomous marketing, or marketing that is auto-optimized and auto-customized according to customer insights and machine-generated learning, can reinvigorate marketing campaigns. The key being it’s a more responsive marketing campaign that continuously strengthens and adjusts itself.
Use customer insights to create stronger sales-marketing partnerships by increasing positive brand awareness and generating more accurate information on qualified leads and revenue attribution. In other words, more insight contributing to less finger-pointing and, ultimately, greater partnerships.
Translate data into business impact by building custom sales kits appropriate for every opportunity and every customer, monitoring the end-to-end customer life cycle, and keeping customers hooked. After all, according to Marcoux, “existing customers are the best sellers.”
Data insights will help drive marketing at the deepest strategic levels, providing actionable insights that can constantly be measured against and refined. Remember, it’s not how much data you’ve got, it’s what you do with it. If your organization has started to use data insights in your marketing efforts, do you have any tips on how to better use data? Sound off in the comments!
Autonomous Marketing: Using data to perfectly personalize marketing efforts [Microsoft for Work Blog, Jan 30, 2014]
Personalization is the gold standard for marketing efforts. If you can connect with a customer on a personal level and demonstrate that you understand your audience, the customer is far more likely to respond to your marketing campaigns. It may seem like a daunting task to crunch that much customer information and automatically adapt it to your marketing efforts, but it doesn’t have to be. Technologies exist that allow you to update campaigns with new data (auto-optimize) and use that updated data to better target your efforts (auto-customize), removing the guesswork you’re your campaigns. Marketing that is auto-optimized and auto-customized based on customer insights and machine generated learning—called “autonomous marketing”—is now a tangible reality for many businesses.
Autonomous marketing and big data will be critical in re-imagining a more personalized approach to marketing—and learning to harness this approach will keep your business ahead of the curve as marketing innovators.
Data, data everywhere…
The amount of data available today is overwhelming. Take, for example, a single business—just between the company’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter, there’s a lot to keep track of. All this information needs to be consolidated and combed to figure out which data is significant and what happens next. For many businesses the question becomes: what do I do with my data?
According to Jeff Marcoux, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics CRM, that data should be fed to an engine that’