MS Tech Days 2012 in Paris

The Microsoft Tech Days that took place in Paris, February 6-8, was a great way for us to discover how Microsoft is tackling Big Data.
There are two subjects when we talk about Big Data: Evangelizing and software solutions.

Evangelizing Big Data is a hard task, because you need to explain what is Big Data, why companies will need it and how Big Data technologies like Hadoop will bring values to the users.

On the software side, Microsoft decided to add Hadoop to Windows Azure. Now you can store your data in the cloud (private or public) and all the software stack has access to it (Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server …). This move is pretty interesting, the talks mentioned that they have been working for many years on Hadoop, however last year a researcher from Microsoft was still talking about Dryad.

So Microsoft joins the Hadoop bus, as Oracle and IBM have done before, and they propose the whole solution. Instead of Java, they encourage you to write your MapReduce in various Microsoft languages, such as C#, and even in Javascript!

We believe this is a very interesting move, Hadoop and Hadoop users can only win from this environment.