Cortana Analytics Suite

Editor's Notes

1. TODO: Business solutions vs product solutions IoT suite Security slide Like a cable service Show Cortana Halo picture
2. Data is now the key strategic business asset. Every device, every customer, every activity – everything that’s happening in the world around us - is producing incredibly rich data that can help us create new experiences, new efficiencies, new business models and even new inventions. Leveraging this data can be the differentiator for your business. For example, IDC estimates companies that are leaders in using data assets to their advantage will capture $1.6 trillion more in business value than those that lag behind.   While data is pervasive, actionable intelligence from data is elusive. Our customers want to transform data to intelligent action and reinvent their business processes. To do this they need to more easily analyze massive amounts of data – so they can move from seeing “what happened” and understanding “why it happened” to predicting “what will happen” and ultimately, knowing “what should I do”. Only then can they create the intelligent enterprise.
3. Data is pervasive, yet insights are elusive. According to Gartner, more than 85 percent of the data available to organizations is automatically generated – from every device, sensor, upload, tweet, purchase, shipment and keystroke. Yet many organizations experience challenges as they try to draw actionable insights from a world of big data… Reactively seeking small patterns and insights from data, and then having the ability to act on it. Shifting from the analysis of what happened in the past to predicting what might happen in the future  the key to shaping new business outcomes. And ultimately moving from manual, people-heavy decision making to automated machine-assisted decisions that accelerate business and aid competitive advantage.
4. Cortana Analytics is a fully managed big data and advanced analytics suite that transforms your data into intelligent action.   It is a comprehensive suite that brings together technologies throughout Microsoft and provides fast and flexible deployment with a simple monthly subscription to reduce the time and cost.   With Cortana Analytics, we are taking years of research and innovation – spanning technology & infrastructure for advanced analytics, including capabilities such as machine learning, big data storage and processing in the cloud, perceptual intelligence e.g. vision, face and speech recognition and integration with Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant with the goal of helping enterprise customers make better, faster decisions to accelerate their speed of business.
5. The Cortana Analytics Suite integrates with Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant. Cortana works with the Cortana Analytics Suite to enable your business, and or your customers business, to get things done in more helpful, proactive, and natural ways. Building on years of Microsoft’s research and innovation in perceptual intelligence including speech recognition, natural user interaction, predictive and advanced analytics, Cortana brings the capabilities of a personal digital assistant to business. Cortana Analytics helps you Interact with customers and stakeholders in new ways and infer intent with vision, face, speech, text and sentiment analysis to customize responses and drive appropriate actions. We call this Perceptual Intelligence. The Vision, Face, Text and Speech APIs enable these new types of scenarios. What we showcased with www.how-old.net is a small example of what is possible.
6. Cortana Analytics Suite delivers an end-to-end platform with integrated and comprehensive set of tools and services to help you build intelligent applications that let you easily take advantage of Advanced Analytics. First Cortana Analytics Suite provides services to bring data in, so that you can analyze it.  It provides information management capabilities like Azure Data Factory so that you can pull data from any source (relational DB like SQL or non-relational ones like your Hadoop cluster) in an automated and scheduled way, while performing the necessary data transforms (like setting certain data colums as dates vs. currency etc).  Think ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) in the cloud. Event hub does the same for IoT type ingestion of data that streams in from lots of end points. The data brought in then can be persisted in flexible big data storage services like Data Lake and Azure SQL DW. You can then use a wide range of analytics services from Azure ML to Azure HDInsight to Azure Stream Analytics to analyze the data that are stored in the big data storage.  This means you can create analytics services and models specific to your business need (say real time demand forecasting). The resultant analytics services and models created by taking these steps can then be surfaced as interactive dashboards and visualizations via Power BI These same analytics services and models created can also be integrated into various different UI (web apps or mobile apps or rich client apps) as well as via integrations with Cortana, so end users can naturally interact with them via speech etc., and so that end users can get proactively be notified by Cortana if the analytics model finds a new anomaly (unusual growth in certain product purchases- in the case of real time demand forecasting example given above) or whatever deserves the attention of the business users.
7. Analytics that enables action Take action ahead of your competitors by going beyond looking in the rear-view mirror to predicting what’s next. Enhance your business applications with machine intelligence to evolve from simple descriptive analytics to prescriptive recommendations. KEY BENEFITS Predict: Predict what will happen with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms Prescribe: Augment and improve your decision making processes with proactive alerting and recommendations on actions to take Automate: Simplify and automate decision making when dealing with complex problems that involve multiple variables that may change in real time Personal Digital Assistant – Cortana Integrate with Cortana, your truly personal digital assistant.  Cortana works with the Cortana Analytics Suite to enable your business, and your customers business, to get things done in more helpful, proactive, and natural ways. KEY BENEFITS: Helpful: By intelligently learning about your business needs over time, Cortana becomes increasingly helpful when it comes to connecting data into intelligent action. Natural interaction: Interact with you data with natural language and speech, through Cortana.   Proactive: Always looking out for you and your customers, Cortana can analyze business and customer data to pro-actively suggest helpful actions, trends and insights.   Perceptual intelligence Interact with customers and stakeholders in new ways and infer intent with vision, face, speech, text and sentiment analysis to customize responses and drive appropriate actions. KEY BENEFITS See: Recognize your users and customers with face detection, identification and verification. Recognize objects within images to tailor your responses to your customers Hear: Add speech recognition and response to your applications and translate spoken words into intent to drive actions needed for the business Read: Understand and analyze text, e.g. customer feedback on your site or forum, to determine overall sentiment and key phrases Fast and flexible Why start from scratch when you don’t have to? Build with partner solutions for your industry or extend our basic building blocks to tailor the solution to your specific needs. KEY BENEFITS Get started quickly: Build on top of industry-specific partner solutions or customize machine learning models, APIs and templates from our Solutions Gallery Use all your data: Connect to and get value from data of any volume, variety and velocity both on premises and in the cloud Open and extensible: Empower your organization to work with the languages and frameworks they already know and use like R, Python and Hadoop Secure and scalable Your business needs will grow over time; so should your infrastructure. Continue to get value from your data in a secure, compliant and scalable way. KEY BENEFITS Secure: Keep your customers’ data safe on a trusted and secure cloud platform with encrypted communications, threat management, mitigation practices and regular penetration testing Compliant: Ensure infrastructure compliance with your industry through our broad set of compliance standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Scalable: Elastically scale to petabytes of data as your business needs grow over time, while keeping the flexibility and choice to manage multiple data repositories in the cloud Tried and tested innovation Industry leading performance of machine learning algorithms and technology built with over a decade of investments by Microsoft Research and operated at global scale in our businesses like XBox, Skype and Bing. KEY BENEFITS Cutting edge technology: Maintain your competitive edge with a rich pipeline of technologies from Microsoft Research in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, speech recognition and computational linguistics Continuous improvement: Your investment gets better over time with continuous improvement and testing of new technologies in global scale businesses like XBox, Skype and Bing One simple subscription: Simplify your costs for building a comprehensive Big Data and advanced analytics solution that is billed with a predictable monthly cost
8. Cortana Analytics enables core business scenarios such as real-time recommendations, customer churn forecasting, fraud detection, predictive maintenance and many more.   For e.g. we are working with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the largest hospital in northern New England, to develop a remote monitoring and predictive analytics solution to lower re-admittance rates called “ImagineCare.” Leveraging predictive analytics, ImagineCare will be to enable dynamic treatment plans based on the individual patient’s history and profile. ImagineCare aims to significantly enhance patient outcomes by predicting catastrophic events such as, heart attacks before they happen. It will also reduce the number of “readmissions” because each patient will be proactively monitored and Dartmouth-Hitchcock can contact the patient with tweaks/recommendations to the individual’s pathway based on the data collected. Other customers who are using Cortana Analytics capabilities include: Pier 1 https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=11257 Carnegie Mellon https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=8576 Wash https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=11768 Stanford Linear Accelerator https://news.microsoft.com/features/from-atoms-to-quarks-to-the-cosmos-internet-of-things-helps-lab-explore-the-origins-of-the-universe/ Ziosk http://news.microsoft.com/features/tabletop-tablets-provide-a-better-experience-for-diners-and-valuable-data-for-restaurants/ Genscape https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=21394
9. As I mentioned, these products and services are available to transact today. Our data science team and field teams have seen 4 key areas in which there is the most opportunity. For example, sales and marketing is an area where there is an explosion of non-sensitive customer sentiment and transaction data which is a perfect match for the scalability of the cloud. In customer and channel, we’re also seeing a tremendous level of demand for personalized offers across retail and financial services online and in store. Cortana Analytics is the Suite that can deliver on these scenarios and more.
10. As we’re looking at key scenarios, we’re also finding industries in which the radical change in the market is driving innovation and opportunity for our field. For example, in Retail the explosion of online shopping has put a strain on brick and mortar stores not only in staying relevant and connected, but also stocking the right thing at the right time. In Healthcare, the Affordable Care Act’s focus on paying for performance in positive patient outcomes makes a data-driven culture no longer optional. And it’s impossible to miss in the news how the marketplace and regulatory focus has changed infrastructure needs in the financial services industry. You’ll see marketing making specific investments in content in these areas in the coming months.
11. Looking back: It’s been a big year for HDInsight, our 100% Apache Hadoop distribution in Azure.  HDInsight launched as a Globally Available service on October 2013 (Q2, FY14).  From that time there has been major updates including having HDInsight be updated to the latest Hadoop 2.2 clusters and now on Hadoop 2.4 clusters. Microsoft has made major contributions to the Apache open source community through the Stinger project that have improved Hive queries up to 100x faster.  This was made possible by taking some of Microsoft’s know-how in SQL Server and translating that into the open source community.  Finally, Microsoft continues to add Hadoop sub-projects to HDInsight including Hbase, a columnar NoSQL database as a preview feature and Mahout for a library of Machine Learning. Looking forward: For FY15, HDInsight will continue its relatively fast release cadence.  In Q1, FY15, you’ll see HDInsight release HBase, a columnar NoSQL database as a GA feature.  You’ll also see HDInsight arrive in many Azure data centers like Japan, China and Brazil which will give you the ability to sell HDInsight in these regions.  In Q2, FY15, you’ll hear about Hortonworks releasing the next version of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP 2.2) which will have built-in connectors to move data from on-premise to Azure as well as HDInsight being refreshed on this newest version.  You’ll also hear about the release of Storm as a streaming service for near real time processing on data in HDInsight.
12. Areas of investment for BI in Excel: Filtering for Power Map: Available Sept 2014: With filtering in Power Map, use familiar Excel filter controls to uncover more insights from your 3D geospacial visualizations. When using filters, you can adjust the amount of data shown, toggle between different categories or simply search and select specific values for more targeted analyses. Custom Maps for Power Map: Available Sept 2014: Custom Maps extends all the features of Power Map so you can tell rich and interactive stories using any map type. Simply choose an image – like building floor maps, the human body, public transit routes, and system architectures - and Excel will guide you through transforming your data into visualizations that can be explored and shared. OLAP Connectivity within Power View: Connect Power View in Excel to an external Analysis Services model without the need to import the data into Excel. Richer Data Models with Power Pivot: We are enhancing Power Pivot to enable you to create and analyze richer data models, like calculated tables and many-to-many relationships. The relationship between your business data can be complex and Power Pivot, with more powerful data modeling capabilities, allows you to analyze that data effectively to uncover deeper insights that will boost your competitive edge. Deeper Integration of BI in Excel: Power BI for Office 365 adds value to your businesses because it makes BI accessible to your entire team through the familiarity of Excel. The Power BI features in Excel will be integrated more deeply to make it even easier for any business user to discover and start benefiting from the collective intelligence of your business community.
13. Areas of investment for Power BI Power BI dashboards and KPIs – Power BI will provide new capabilities to allow for the creation of live dashboards and easy to create KPIs that can be pinned to the dashboard - from which you can drill into underlying Power View reports for additional detail and data exploration. New data visualizations – we will introduce a host of new data visualizations for Power BI. eg. Tree Map. Touch optimized data exploration in Power View HTML5 – Power View will gain new touch optimized data exploration features allowing users to explore data more easily on touch devices. Power BI mobile applications – beyond the mobile experiences provide through HTML5 we also continue to invest in providing native mobile apps and will soon support both iPad and iPhone. Support for new data sources such as SalesForce.com and Dynamics CRM – new data sources will be added such as SalesFoce.com and tighter integration with CRM online. Support for SQL Server Analysis Services – Power Query will support SQL Server Analysis Services as a data source. Power BI will also support interactive query directly to SQL Server Analysis services on-premises. This will be to both tabular and multidimensional cubes. This will allow organizations to managing and maintain their existing Analysis Services models without having to move their data to the cloud. Users will be able to view and explore their data from Power View in Power BI and the system will directly connect and query against SQL Server Analysis Service on-premises.
14. In a moment Sanjay will show you how Pier 1 is truly putting their data to work. They’re experimenting with monitoring in-store activity with the power of Kinect sensors and combining that with data from customer activity on the web. They’re ingesting that through Event hubs and then putting the data that needs further processing into Azure Data Factory to use HDInsight for batch processing. Stream Analytics takes on data as well. Data Factory then moves that data into Blob storage, where it’s further processed and combined with the Analytics data already sent to Azure SQL Database. Then that Azure DB data is sent to Azure ML, where it can then be modeled, made sense out of, to then deliver predictive results to any number of devices and visualization tools. Does this sound like a lot and a lot of things to buy? Perhaps it does. But what you have bought here – all you need to do all this is Azure. That’s the beauty of the cloud.