Microsoft's Big Data analytics tool, Azure Synapse Analytics, now Generally Available

Microsoft’s Big Data analytics tool, Azure Synapse Analytics, is now generally available.

Azure Synapse Analytics is an analytics service for large data lakes that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or dedicated resources at scale.

As a decision support tool, Azure Synapse brings these worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, manage and serve data for immediate BI and machine-learning needs.

“Today, we are generating data faster than we are able to understand it,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella “It’s relegated to internal and external silos or simply ignored.” Half of Fortune 1,000 executives say they don’t treat their data as a “business asset. It’s not because they don’t think it matters. They just don’t have the process or capability to get there.”

“There’s been this no-man’s land between where the data sits and how you are using the data,” said Michele Goetz, an analyst at Forrester. “There’s a lot that needs to be done to transform the data into something that’s usable and contextual.”

Microsoft said they used the tool internally for financial forecasting. Microsoft’s finance team was able to combine 120 different data sources in Azure, allowing them to better see all the information and improve accuracy by 50%.

“Going from 3% to 1.5% is the difference frankly between being right and being wrong and saving hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood.

Microsoft also announced a new compliance tool, Azure Purview. Purview lets companies find confidential data and allows executives responsible for securing it to get a high-level view of all the information in various programs, including those from rivals like Amazon and SAP, said Jason Zander, Azure executive vice president.

Microsoft created the tool to help the company remain in compliance with  European data privacy regulations.

“We built out all of these custom tools and work in order to handle exabytes of data,” Zander said. “We’re taking all that technology that we use ourselves and making it available to our customers.”

The tool is currently in Azure Purview Preview. Read more about Azure Synapse Analytics here and Azure Purview here.

via Seattle Times