Microsoft Blends and Bundles Solutions, Launches Cortana Analytics Suite at Orlando.
Microsoft’s (MSFT +2.2%) Cortana Analytics Suite takes aim a burgeoning market for enterprise big data/analytics software/services. At Microsoft’s World Wide Partner Conference in Orlando, the company announced a new blended suite known as Cortana Analytics, a set of programs that CEO Satya Nadella believes will “democratize big data.” Nadella added that Cortana Analytics can “allow any business to transform itself through the power of data,” and is a relatively easy suite of programs to use; Microsoft has significantly reduced the expertise required to make use of Cortana Analytics, which could allow it to be used by a wider range of companies. It includes the Cortana virtual assistant, the Power BI business intelligence/data visualization software platform (just refreshed), face, text, speech, and vision analytics APIs, Azure machine learning and data warehousing services, and Azure recommendation and forecasting APIs. The company’s new Project Gigjam, though, goes a bit further: It customizes a version of itself to help Microsoft’s business customers collaborate. Register now for the 8th annual MobileBeat, July 13-14, where the best and brightest will be exploring the latest strategies and tactics in the mobile space.
It takes the company’s machine learning, big data and analytics products and packages them together in one huge, monolithic suite. “Our goal was to bring integration of these pieces so customers have a comprehensive platform to build intelligent solutions,” Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who is in charge of Azure ML told TechCrunch As for Cortana, which is the Microsoft voice-driven personal assistant tool in Windows 10, it’s a small part of the solution, but Sirosh says Microsoft named the suite after it because it symbolizes the contextualized intelligence that the company hopes to deliver across the entire suite. It includes pieces like Azure ML, the company’s cloud machine learning product, PowerBI, its data visualization tool and Azure Data Catalog, a service announced just last week designed for sharing and surfacing data stores inside a company, among others. Though the session did include some demos, it was mostly devoted to whetting appetites for a future in which Microsoft would reemphasize its original mission of creating innovative products that help people get work done. It combines facets of enterprise IT data processing that are now considered different, marrying structured database information and unstructured info from log files and live data streams culled from Internet of Things gadgets.
The new tool allows workers to pull data from around their enterprise network in order to organize projects, delegate tasks, and work collaboratively with team members on a project. It hopes to take advantage of range of technologies such as face and speech recognition to generate a series of solutions like recommendation engines and churn forecasting. Other tech included in the blended suite includes Power BI, which makes the data more understandable, and Microsoft Machine Learning for using data sets to predict future events. That’s the nature of work, according to chief executive Satya Nadella: “How do we do something like that task as opposed into going into each application.” Microsoft launched the project at its World Partner Conference, a multiday event in Orlando where the software giant works with some of its largest customers.
Most notable about GigJam is that it acknowledges the diverse number and type of apps people and businesses use in their day-to-day work. “GigJam is designed for the emerging workforce that is more connected, more available and more social than ever before. Microsoft expects that by providing an integrated solution, third parties and systems integrators will build packaged solutions based on the suite, and that customers will be attracted by a product with pieces designed to play nicely together.
Also unveiled: GigJam, a productivity service that that uses screen-sharing and the pulling of data from a variety of Microsoft apps to create a shared workspace. With the launch of Windows 10 just weeks away, Nadella’s message said Microsoft wanted to help businesses redefine how they work, a process he called ‘business transformation.’ “This is a glimpse of what can happen when we break down the walls between devices, applications, and people, and bring them together,” Nadella said. With GigJam, a business can expect a dramatic transformation of every process where humans have the potential to exercise discretion and work with others, colleagues as well as customers,” Microsoft vice president of software strategy Darryl Rubin and Microsoft general manager Vijay Mital wrote in a blog post announcing the new software. Businesses can use Cortana Analytics to predict customer churn, or the phenomenon of customers switching to competitor products or services, and also to schedule preventative maintenance. Why this matters: Microsoft has pursued some interesting projects in the past, like Sway and Delve, that have broken free of the constraints of individual apps.
In the video, a man named Ben summons up information about his customers using Cortana: “OK Cortana, show me my open orders,” and then “Hey Cortana, bring up my customers.” Ben then links the two sets of data (customers and and open orders) and shares that information with relevant colleagues. Whether Microsoft can adapt this flexibility to the dynamic and often very specific problems teams face on a daily basis, however, remains to be seen.
The same technology could also be used to help teens coordinate among themselves which clothes to buy—and to rope in a parent who controlled the budget, according to a Gigjam product page. An engineer assigned to inspect an aircraft fuselage can opportunistically accelerate the work by divvying up some of it for a couple of colleagues who happen to be nearby and free, while still maintaining personal responsibility through the ability to review the colleagues’ input before committing it.
Sirosh was careful to point out that this is more of a future ideal, but Microsoft is hoping that by putting these pieces together in a coordinated fashion, it will provide a platform for these types of sophisticated projects moving forward. Julia White, who helps market Microsoft’s Office suite, called Gigjam “an empty canvas that I can fill [up] with the information I need.” Gigjam created a space where White could pull in relevant customer information from Microsoft Dynamics, then relevant email that described the relationship.
Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through … read more » What Microsoft is doing with this suite is the tried and true packaging technique, we have seen from big companies like Microsoft, IBM and Adobe for years, taking a group of somewhat-related products and putting them together to encourage customers to buy all of the products instead of just a couple.
If not, others can work asynchronously and then send the results back to you. “Every task can potentially become a multi-user task at will, with almost no friction,” says Vijay Mital, Microsoft’s general manager of ambient computing and robotics. White was then able to share the information with a colleague on an iPhone and then to a Surface Hub, simply by circling the relevant information and then sharing it with the appropriate person. Sirosh wouldn’t discuss pricing, but if you buy one suite, you’ll get a simpler billing model and more savings than you would get buying the individual pieces, he said. But it’s not just a technological-pie-in-the-sky lab project: Mital told me that it will ship “soon.” If Microsoft had announced something like GigJam a decade or two ago, you would have reasonably expected it to involve proprietary Microsoft technologies and a Windows-centric approach.
In the live demo, the colleague misinterpeted a casual comment by White to “share it with me” as the actual command, indicating that Microsoft may have to rejigger its language. It seems like a sound marketing practice, but in reality customers have indicated over the last several years, they want the best of breed across product categories and prefer to string together the products they want or already own. According to White, each instance of Gigjam creates its own “mini app,” sharing just the information that each chooses to contribute, and even allowing some control over the user interface. “We would have wasted half a day chasing the right people and making sure they were on the right page,” White said. “I was able to divvy up the work—not the communications—but the work tasks themselves.” Instead of devising its own plumbing to make GigJam possible, Mital says, Microsoft built it using web standards such as REST, OAuth, JavaScript, and HTML5. That means that it’s not tied to Windows, and can be used out of the box to share information from both Microsoft products such as Office 365 and Dynamics and non-Microsoft offerings from companies including Salesforce and SAP.
In a less obvious way, what GigJam evokes for me are Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) and OpenDoc, two 1990s technologies designed to let you grab bits and pieces of information from word processors, spreadsheets, and other sources, and then assemble them into compound documents. And instead of being built for the age of office suites on PCs, it was conceived in an era when people are using all sorts of tools to get at all sorts of information on all sorts of devices. Nope, Mital told me: Two or three coworkers who are intrigued by the idea will be able to download GigJam clients from the appropriate app stores and try it on their own. And even more than HoloLens or the Surface Hub, its use of multiplatform software to create an experience which travels across devices feels like a real-world manifestation of the uniquely Microsoftian productivity vision which Satya Nadella has been talking up.