Guest Post from Dave Campbell of Microsoft on their Big Data strategy and why they chose Hortonworks over Cloudera.

Last February at Strata Conference in Santa Clara we shared Microsoft’s progress on Big Data, specifically working to broaden the adoption of Hadoop with the simplicity and manageability of Windows and enabling customers to easily derive insights from their structured and unstructured data through familiar tools like Excel.

Hortonworks is a recognized pioneer in the Hadoop Community and a leading contributor to the Apache Hadoop project, and that’s why we’re excited to announce our expanded partnership with Hortonworks to give customers access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop that is 100 percent compatible with Windows Server and Windows Azure.  To provide customers with access to this Hadoop compatibility, yesterday we also released new previews of Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows and Windows Azure HDInsight Service, our Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Server and Windows Azure.

With this expanded partnership, the Hadoop community will reap the following benefits of Hadoop on Windows:

• Insights to all users from all data: Analyze unstructured Hadoop data with familiar tools like Excel.  Through integration with award-winning Microsoft BI tools such as PowerPivot and Power View,  HDInsight enables analysis of all your data (structured or unstructured), including data on Linux .

• Enterprise-ready Hadoop with HDInsight: Offering the most reliable, innovative and trusted distribution available.  Microsoft and Hortonworks together deliver tighter security through integration with Windows Server Active Directory, ease of management through System Center integration, and built-in high availability with Hortonworks Data Platform 1.1. Additionally, harness your existing .NET and JavaScript developers with rich developer frameworks that enable them to write and deploy MapReduce jobs.

• Simplicity of Windows for Hadoop: Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows Server significantly simplifies setup and provisioning of Hadoop through streamlined packaging.  So, you don’t need to choose and test the right Hadoop projects on your own.  In the cloud, Windows Azure HDInsight Service simplifies deployment so much that you can now setup a 16-node Hadoop cluster in only 10 minutes!  System Center simplifies management through integration with the Apache Ambari project.  With this integration IT Operators can manage their Hadoop clusters side-by-side with their databases, applications and other IT assets on a single glass pane.

• Extend your data warehouse with Hadoop: HDP 1.1 improves integration of Hadoop with relational Data Warehouses with HCatalog.  This provides SQL-like language access to Hadoop so that customers can enrich their analysis by including insights from Hadoop environments into the Enterprise Data Warehouse and BI systems.  Additionally, Microsoft enables customers to extend their Enterprise Data Warehouses with Hadoop connectors for SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse appliance.

• Seamless Scale and Elasticity of the Cloud: Microsoft offers HDInsight both in the cloud and on-premise, with seamless migration across the two environments based on your needs. The cloud service offers elastic scalability, a simplified deployment and management experience and a low-cost way to experiment with Hadoop. Deploying Microsoft HDInsight Server on Windows Server provides enterprise-class security through integration with Active Directory, simplified management with System Center management and availability with a trusted and reliable Hadoop distribution.

This is a very exciting milestone, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride as we continue partnering with Hortonworks to democratize big data.  Download HDInsight today at Microsoft.com/BigData.