Surprise! Microsoft Future Is Dependent on Data

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In his July 10th email to employees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentions the word “data” no fewer than 15 times.   This simple fact serves to highlight how dealing with data is a foundational part of Microsoft’s future strategy.   When he describes a “mobile-first and cloud-first world”, Mr. Nadella is describing a world where data is ubiquitous in “the background of our lives”.   He wants to position Microsoft at the twin apexes of both producing and consuming all that data.
The keystone to that strategy is Microsoft’s hyper-scale public cloud platform, Azure. Azure is positioned to serve as a cloud data storage hub, offering NoSQL style BLOB storage as well as traditional relational storage with Azure SQL Database.   The HDInsight service leverages Azure BLOB storage to offer a Big Data option in the form of a full-blown Hadoop installation in the cloud. And virtualized SQL Servers can also be spun up for purposes including cloud-based BI and analytics.
Beyond even the cloud, the newly re-branded Microsoft Analytics Platform System is combination of SQL Server PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) appliance with a local installation of HDInsight. Microsoft’s breakthrough Polybase technology allows integration between the two, allowing SQL users to query Big Data directly. And of course SQL Server 2014 joins the In-Memory database market, and still provides traditional SQL Server value and power in the on-premises market.
So, that sums up the Producing side. But what about Consuming?
Working from a position of some strength — and frankly also trying to ignore a traditional weakness — Microsoft has ordained that Excel is really the ultimate front-end for their BI platform. Power BI is the branding for this collection of services, and the so-called “Power Tools” themselves (Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Query) are the baseline components, available as plugins for desktop Excel and natively in Office 365 Excel.
Office 365 is truly the focus of most of the evolution of the BI delivery platform right now. In addition to the 3 basic Power Tools mentioned above, Office 365 also provides the geospatial analytics tool Power Map (currently also available in Preview for desktop users). And the coup de grâce comes in the form of Power BI Sites — an app available for SharePoint Online that provides collaboration, mobile, and natural language query functionality to the table.
All of these options combine to form Microsoft’s platform for pervasive data. As this strategy matures, I think we can expect to see tools merge and even go away to be replaced by others. But the fact remains that Microsoft is positioning their data platform to serve both cloud and on-premises, to be scalable, and to support goal, to “reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.”