This week, we’re excited that Forrester recognized Microsoft Azure as a leader in their Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions. Apache Hadoop as a technology has become popular amongst organizations to unlock insights from data of all size, shape, and speed. Hadoop power solutions to help businesses improve their performance, educators to better connect with the needs of their students, medical professionals to improve the quality of their care, or researchers to accelerate new advancements in science.

As an example, Ultra Tendency uses Hadoop to achieve something not possible before – visualize more than 27 million distinct sensor readings to give Japanese citizens accurate, up-to-date information about the radiation contamination from the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. More and more organizations are also deploying Hadoop in the cloud with 47% of Forrester’s respondents to a 2015 survey increasing their cloud deployments either by 5-10% (37%) or more than 10% (10%).¹ This makes sense because the cloud allows you to scale elastically on demand to handle the processing of any amount of data.

Our goal is to make big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible to bring big data to everybody. We do this through the Cortana Intelligence Suite which offers a fully managed big data and advanced analytics solution in the cloud. Within Cortana Intelligence is the Azure Data Lake which includes HDInsight, a managed Hadoop service that runs Hortonworks Data Platform, Data Lake Analytics, a new service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales your big data jobs, and Data Lake Store, a single repository to capture data of any size, type, and speed. We also offer IaaS images in Azure Marketplace that deploy any third party Hadoop distribution (Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR).

“We are excited to see Microsoft so prominently placed in the Forrester Big Data Hadoop Cloud Wave,” says Matt Morgan, vice president of product and alliance marketing at Hortonworks. “Azure HDInsight is Hortonworks’ preferred cloud platform to deploy Hortonworks Data Platform and we look forward to continuing our deep partnership together  to give our customers the best options to deploy Hadoop on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid scenarios.”

We’re excited that Forrester recognized both the strength of our offerings as well as our strategy by placing Microsoft in the leader’s ripple of the Big Data Hadoop Cloud Wave. Forrester notes that leaders have the most comprehensive, scalable, and integrated platforms.² Microsoft specifically was called out for having a cloud-first strategy that is paying off.³ In the coming year, we will continue to focus on delivering the highest value to our customers and partners through innovations that make big data and analytics even more accessible. To read the full report, “The Forrester WaveTM: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016,” you can get it here.

¹Source: Forrester’s Global Business TechnographicsⓇ Data and Analytics Survey, 2015.
²Source: The Forrester WaveTM: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016.
³Source: The Forrester WaveTM: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016.