Microsoft announced the Cortana Analytics Suite. It takes the company’s machine learning, big data and analytics products and packages them together in one 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.
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.
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.
It’s All About Integration
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.
It is building in integration, thereby reducing the complexity of making these types of tools work together.
As an example, Microsoft talked about a coordinated medical care project at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
The program, called ImagineCare, is built on top of the Cortana Analytics Suite and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM tool.
Microsoft made billions for years delivering a similar type of integration with the Office suite. Adobe did the same thing with Creative Suite, both companies delivering ways to work more easily across the products that make up the suite.