After serving as a virtual assistant on Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 10 OS, Cortana is gearing up to provide enterprises with big data-derived business insights.

 As an accessible and user-friendly technology, Cortana is the perfect embodiment of Microsoft's goal of placing advanced, contextually aware data analytics and machine learning technologies and tools in the hands of developers and, ultimately, everyday users, according to Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. Cortana Analytics Suite is a fully managed set of cloud services that tie together information management, machine learning, and big data storage and processing, along with vision, face and speech analysis.

As its name implies, it also integrates Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant for Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 10 OS. Visualizations and analytics dashboards are provided by the company's Power BI product.

 The result is a platform for organizations to build predictive and prescriptive capabilities into their work processes. Despite being based on several pre-existing cloud solutions from Microsoft, Cortana Analytics Suite is not simply a new bundled subscription offering, stressed Sirosh.

 "With Cortana Analytics Suite, partners can now help their customers add intelligence to applications and across business scenarios," Numoto wrote. "Cloud is arguably as big a disruptor in technology as data is and today we're announcing new programs that help partners accelerate our customers' transition to cloud computing and embrace and manage the ever growing set of devices we all use to get our jobs done."

Cortana Analytics Suite will be available this fall. Once launched, Sirosh pledged that Microsoft will continue to expand on its data gathering and analytics capabilities. His group views the product as "a vehicle into which we'll continue to add innovation over time that keeps elevating [its] value," he said.

Source : http://www.eweek.com