Mastering Azure Analytics, 1st Edition

Foreword

“Every 25 milliseconds, a turbine emits 10 distinct data points…” began almost every customer conversation about big data and advanced analytics that I’ve been a part of over the last six years. A simple story about the data needs of a wind farm highlighted the evolving size, speed, and shape of data that is representative of customers across industries. Over time, the technology names, the integration scenarios, and the guidance would evolve, but a few things remained consistent despite the ever-increasing pace of change:

• Customers are faced with a rapidly expanding amount of data, in a variety of shapes and sizes, generated and stored throughout their environment.
• Deep understanding of customers, of purchase patterns, of machine performance, of transaction streams, and more, is fast becoming table stakes as competitors are doing the same.
• The pace of innovation from vendors, and more importantly the ecosystem, is operating at what feels like a record high.

The value that customers get from advanced analytics, big data, and machine learning can transform businesses, but there are still a lot of pieces that need to come together. I’ve been fortunate to have had such an immensely exciting, rewarding, and simply fun time building products customers can use to solve these challenges. These technologies have, in many cases, enabled people to build solutions that simply weren’t possible 5 or 10 years ago.

The addition of the Azure cloud in these scenarios has given customers ...